Old games and indie are mostly fine. Anything newer or open world and you’ll need a SSD or a level 2 cache at least. NOTE: this only applies to CMR hard disks, SMR hard disks are unusable.

This could be an issue where the AMD GPU is only being used. I, like some of the others would suggest Linux Mint.

The price listed sounds fair. I don’t think this journalist has considered the costs at all.