I need a new laptop for high school, but I do some PC gaming on the side. I would like to get, or build I guess, a laptop with reasonable gaming capacity for under $700. Recommendations?
Building one is nearly impossible. If you're looking for one I'd suggest no less than 4GB of RAM, 64Bit Win7 Home Premium, 500GB or more HDD, and something like a Radeon HD 6000 Series GPU.
Screen Size doesn't matter too much, 15.3 or 17. Your preference.
Why do you need one for high school? I'd wait for university and save some for one then when it's much more beneficial.
$700 won't get you to far in the laptop gaming scene unfortunately. Other big negative to laptops is you can't upgrade them (well not really). That's the other reason why I'd wait to get one. You'll get a limited gaming window out of it.
As others have said you will probably not buy a gaming laptop at that price range unless it is second hand. But it does depend on what games you want to play. If its games a few years old you might buy something which will be decent enough.
Spend $200 on a netbook and the other $500 on a pc (or upgrades to a current pc).
I spent almost £600 (Which I think was around $750) on a laptop a few years back. In terms of gaming capacity it became obsolete very fast, I would advise against it unless you have over $1000 to spare.
This laptop will allow you to play games under your budget. Lasts 4.5 hours so it will be good for school work and allow you to play today's games in low settings(Such as Crysis 2 = 27fps, Mafia 2 = 35fps, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 = 31fps, Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare = 97fps in the low settings). So it would be entry level gaming that you would be looking at. Also has 6GB of memory and a 750GB HDD.
Though you can have a basic laptop for $330 and you could save your money for a cheap mid-end gaming desktop.
