An all round budget laptop @500$ for some gaming

naximus

Estimable
Apr 9, 2015
1
0
4,510
Im looking to replace my 3 year old Asus K53SD laptop. (2nd gen i3, 4gb RAM, 500gb HDD, geforce 610m)

Just to give a clearer idea of what i need from a new laptop, heres what i did with the old one:
heavy browsing, academic research, word processing
testing out linux distros all the time
dual boot setup, with linux mint as my main workhorse OS. win7 for any gaming.

now, i see that people seem to have different standards on what constitutes acceptable gaming. :) i have a decent desktop with a middling sapphire radeon card that can handle most of my FPS and RPG gaming. the Geforce 610m on the Asus hardly qualifies as a dedicated graphics card, but i have managed to install and run the following games:
Sleeping dogs
Skyrim,
Deus Ex Human Revolution
Older Assassins Creed titles
most of these were just to see if the GPU could handle it. and it could, with some tinkering and lowering of video settings.
i did finish tomb raider on the laptop though, when i was away from my desktop for an extended period of time! now u know what i consider acceptable when it comes playability.
but my main gaming requirements will be:
Fifa and PES 2015, Europa Universalis IV and other upcoming Paradox grand strategy games, Civ Beyond Earth, Some of the older RTS and real time tactics titles like Dawn of War II. not much of FPS games.

So do i go for:
a 4th gen i3 with geforce gt820m
OR
an amd a8-6410 with HD 8570m
OR
a 4th gen i5 with HD 4400/4600.

budget is USD 500 or, adjusting for market rate differences here in India, INR 35000.

thanks in advance for your inputs guys.
 

Turb0Yoda

Honorable
Herald
Jul 12, 2013
66
0
10,610
YES YES YES LINUX FOR THE WIN!!!
Basically what happened to my desktop was a bajillion virtual machines and partitions... anyways... I'd go for the i3 with the 820m since it is the most powerfull. Runner up is the AMD, then the i5...