£500, $800 Gaming laptop? Can it be done?

[Hitch22]

Hi guys, I need to buy a gaming laptop for a friend in the next 2 days for around £500 GBP. $800 US.  Can this be done?

I live in the UK.

Any advice on graphics cards to get/avoid would be helpful to me.

Thank you friends!

[alaricljs]

Something around a Radeon 6470M is the best you'll get in that price range.  Honestly, no idea how that performs.  Dell Inspiron 15R on sale (at least in the US).

edit:  According to this it's really rather crap.  Which is pretty much what you get for discrete graphics in a laptop in that price range.

edit2: You could get the better performing nVidia GT 520M from Sager... but then you drop half the HDD space (although this one is faster @7200rpm), 2GB of RAM, and Dell's support...

[Malphas]

Depends what types of games you're talking about, popular mainstream games like COD4 and Starcraft can run on almost anything.

You could probably get something with one of these in it for under £500 easily enough.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-525M.43889.0.html

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-540M.41715.0.html

[Hitch22]

Thanks for the advice so far guys.

What do you think about refurbished laptops from dell? Seems pretty sweet value....

These have GT555 gcards for around £500
http://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukdfh1&l=en&s=dfh&brandid=7&fid=1221

[alaricljs]

Well, comes with the same standard warranty as new... I've never heard anyone cry about the deal they got on a refurb.  That said, it's still a refurb there will be wear on the housing, keyboard, really any exposed surface.

[Quarzac]

There's a couple of options through Sager. They supposedly make some quality laptops.