Well here is my recent experience: my daughter's cheap Lenovo laptop broke, after three years of college. It served her well except for one thing: this new game "Stray" (on steam) requires something better than Intel integrated graphics to work.
Anyway, so new laptop is HP "Victus" for $1100. It includes Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti, so now she can play Stray. It seems like a good deal: 512 GB SSD, Core i7, 16 GB RAM.
The laptop is all fan :-) She discovered that it quickly overheats if you put it on the bed (blocks the vents on the bottom). Also the battery drains real-fast when using the GPU. Also the power brick is larger.