Laptop Vs Laptop

Solution
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Although the recommended Acer laptop is $480 ($30 above your your budget), it is worth spending the extra $30. Plus Newegg will not charge you tax unless you live in CA (Newegg's HQ location) or NJ / TN where Newegg has warehouses. Amazon and the Microsoft Store will charge you tax regardless where you live. While the nVidia 940m GPU is not considered a gaming GPU it is a lot more powerful than Intel's integrated graphic cores. This also has a 1080p resolution screen which means you can see more information on the screen at once. Just be aware that the nVidia 940m is not powerful enough to play the vast majority of recent games at 1080p.

The Acer F15 laptop has a Core i5-4210u and the Intel HD 4400 and it is "okay" for playing...
^^^

Although the recommended Acer laptop is $480 ($30 above your your budget), it is worth spending the extra $30. Plus Newegg will not charge you tax unless you live in CA (Newegg's HQ location) or NJ / TN where Newegg has warehouses. Amazon and the Microsoft Store will charge you tax regardless where you live. While the nVidia 940m GPU is not considered a gaming GPU it is a lot more powerful than Intel's integrated graphic cores. This also has a 1080p resolution screen which means you can see more information on the screen at once. Just be aware that the nVidia 940m is not powerful enough to play the vast majority of recent games at 1080p.

The Acer F15 laptop has a Core i5-4210u and the Intel HD 4400 and it is "okay" for playing some games. I got Skyrim running on a friend's laptop with the same Intel HD 4400, but graphic settings basically had to set to low, shadows disabled and no anti-aliasing to get decent performance of 40+ FPS.

The Surface 3 has an Intel Atom CPU (Cherry Trail X7000 series??). The CPU itself is a lot less powerful than a Core i3 CPU and it's graphics core is even less powerful than the Intel HD 4400. It's about on par with the Intel HD 3000 that is in Intel's 2nd generation Core CPUs released in 2011. Additionally, the keyboard and the digital pen are sold separately; probably adds about $150 to the price.



From a gaming perspective, the Acer laptop recommended by hang-the-9 is your best option.

For schoolwork, the Surface 3 is your best option as long as you purchase the keyboard and pen as well. OneNote is great to taking notes as well as recording lectures (audio only) while you are taking notes. So if you are going to a economic class where you will likely be taking notes and drawing graphs during the lecture you. OneNote will allow you to playback the entire recorded lecture (unless you run out of space on the SSD) as a "video"; at the point you start writing notes / draw graphs during the lecture you will see them written / drawn on the screen.
 
Solution
I have a laptop from 2011 with an Intel HD 3000 (about equal to the Cherry Trail graphics core in the Surface 3), and I can tell you it is pretty bad for playing modern games when not using the dedicated nVidia 550m GPU. Running Skyrim using only the Intel HD 3000 at 1366x768 and low graphic settings the performance generally ranges between 18 FPS to 25 FPS most of the time.
 

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I'm going to use it for minecraft, not any major games and mostly social media i just need to know a general good laptop for 450$