Yes, you can buy an actual gaming laptop for $649 (even one with a 120Hz display)

If you're in the market for a cheap gaming laptop, you'd be hard pressed to find better value than this Lenovo Legion 5. It's the same one we highlighted a few weeks ago when it went on sale for $699, a fantastic value at the time, and now it is even a better deal—Walmart slashed another $50 off the price, bringing it down to $649.

That's without any mail-in-rebates or coupon codes, mind you. Just an enticing $250 discount (versus its $899 MSRP) on a value-oriented laptop, with some features that are typically reserved for pricier systems. Like a 120Hz refresh rate on the 15.6-inch display.

Sure, you won't always be able take full advantage of the refresh rate with the allotted hardware. But there are definitely times when this gaming laptop should be capable of pushing frame rates north of the 60 fps mark (especially in lower demanding games, like several esports titles).

The laptop is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 4600H processor, a 6-core/12-thread chip based on Zen 2, with a 3GHz base clock, up to a 4GHz max boost clock, and 8MB of L3 cache.

This is paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti GPU, another pleasant surprise (we'll take the Ti variant over the regular model at this price point any day).

Less enticing is the 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD that serves as the primary storage device. Though it does also come with a 1TB HDD at least, to help make better use of the main SSD. And fortunately, it looks rather easy to get at the guts of the Legion 5 to add more RAM or storage, if the need or desire arises. You could, for example, upgrade to 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, and still be well under a grand.

Is this the best gaming laptop money can buy? Not even close (we're partial to the Razer Blade 15 and the more recent AMD-focused Blade 14), but it is definitely one of the best value-for-money gaming laptops out there, and especially at this price.

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).