Laptop for my brother under $600

[Comp2014]

I am looking for a laptop for my brother that needs at least 8GB of ram a dedicated graphics card with 2GB vram and a 2 year accidental damage+ normal warranty and needs to be under $600. Do you guys have any ideas that are better than a manufacture refurbished lenovo Z40 ? I am going to add a 256gb ssd and that does not come out of the 600 so bear that in mind. His school work demands windows to run. Thank you for you help

 

[user5498]

My best recommendation would probably have to be to check craigslist - have had trouble in past finding something w/ dedicated gfx like that on somewhere such as amazon; new would likely be cost prohibitive, and/or beyond the specs you're looking for - bringing about the higher price. If you just check in here and there, something will come up - just have to be ready to grab it.

 

[Comp2014]

Thank you. However my mom wants a new laptop with a warrenty so that is why I was looking at refurbished lenovo Z40's as I can get a extended warrenty on them and get a much more powerful laptop then he already has.

 

[user5498]

For sure - one you mentioned seems pretty good if he doesn't care about screen size; seems fairly portable as well. And I'll say I'm often a fan of lenovo products - plus I believe you'll be able to put battery manager on it (might only apply to thinkpads, couldn't say for absolute certain atm), one of few vendor software pieces to work for charging threshold levels.

 

[velo3100]

What kind of school work does your brother do?

 

[Comp2014]

he is mainly doing stuff that he could do on any windows laptop with a 250GB hard drive as the programs take like 50GB, however he is looking at getting into some video editing and light to medium gaming. He is coming from a AMD a6-5200 laptop that he is doing the same things on so the power difference between a i5 4th gen and a a6 is huge!

 

[velo3100]

I would suggest an acer v series with a gt 840m and an i5 if you can get one. That should be enough for light to medium gaming and be able to handle simple video editing easily.