AnandTech - Best $500.00 Laptops: Holiday 2014

Haven't read the article. I just saw it go by on Blue's News and thought it was timely.

Regarding gaming: The Intel 4100 card you mentioned will be crap for games, modern games will be a slide show. You should get a laptop with an actual gaming video chip. But even if you have a gaming chipset on a laptop, unless you're getting a top of the line super-gaming machine like an Alienware laptop, modern games will still be a disappointment. Modern games still target the highest performance *desktop* graphics cards, unfortunately. My laptop is fairly recent, it has an NVIDIA GeForce GT 735M with 2GB of video RAM, which is a middling gaming chipset, and I'm still unhappy with its performance. I'm playing Grimrock 2 on the thing right now, and it's very stuttery at times. I'm only tolerating it because the game doesn't need a high frame rate to be playable.