Looking for a practical laptop for medium/light gaming

[Bill2002]

I am looking for something maybe like a Lenovo T520, which is the one I have but suffers from poor battery life and has no dedicated video card. If any of you have seen the new $800 gaming laptop from Dell, I am looking for something like that, but perhaps cheaper. No more than $800, $500 would be a good price. Things that are important to me are the screen, trackpad, keyboard, and video card. As long as the battery isn't awful it's OK for me. I'm also fine with buying used or something that's a few years old. I would play games like TF2, CS:GO, Minecraft, those somewhat basic games a lot, and basic school stuff. If any of you know a good laptop, let me know, I'm open to almost anything here.

 

[xbizzaroz]

AMD laptops run at a pretty good price. I recommend anything with at least an A8 chip at a minimum. They won't have a dedicated graphics card but R5 and R7 integrated graphics will do just fine on those games.

 

[AlphaCompton]

I am looking for something maybe like a Lenovo T520, which is the one I have but suffers from poor battery life and has no dedicated video card. If any of you have seen the new $800 gaming laptop from Dell, I am looking for something like that, but perhaps cheaper. No more than $800, $500 would be a good price. Things that are important to me are the screen, trackpad, keyboard, and video card. As long as the battery isn't awful it's OK for me. I'm also fine with buying used or something that's a few years old. I would play games like TF2, CS:GO, Minecraft, those somewhat basic games a lot, and basic school stuff. If any of you know a good laptop, let me know, I'm open to almost anything here.

I'd like to recommend the Lenovo Y50, I own the 2014 model with a Haswell Core i7 and a Geforce 860m. The performance is great and runs the newest games with good settings and all the games you mentioned would run with completely maxed out graphic settings. Battery life is like around 3-4 for normal use and around 2 for gaming ( I'm talking about gaming with Battlefield 4 or Diablo 3 maxed out) , your basic games may allow the laptop to run longer. The only downside for some people is that , there is no disc drive and a down side for me was that you can't play at full performance with the lid closed but I'm not always playing games anyway ( I connect a laptop to a monitor and external keyboard and mouse and your framerate for higher end games will suffer a bit until you open the lid a few inches). The display is 1080p and looks great, not the best viewing angels but not bad. The sound quality is one of the best I've heard in a laptop, movies and music both play wonderfully from the JBL speakers and subwoofer underneath. Also , more importantly , you should be able to find it for the price you're looking for. Good Luck.