Looking for gaming laptop that can do school work as well

[rizmeecalan]

Looking for a gaming laptop that works well for school work, looking to spend around $500, not sure as to what I need, just wanting to be able to run games on steam and do school work on.

 

[Corwin65]

At that budget, you're not going to be able to get a gaming laptop.

 

[jaguarskx]

If you are looking at spending $500 on a new laptop, then you are basically limited to integrated graphics. The following $510 ASUS VivoBook F510UA is generally the best laptop you can that is witihn your price range. It has a quad core i5-8250u CPU, 1080p screen, Intel UHD 620 graphics core, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive.

https/www.amazon.com/VivoBook-i5-8250U-NanoEdge-Fingerprint-F510UA-AH51/dp/B0762S8PYM

Steam sells a lot of games so the term "Steam games" is too generic. Simple games like Shovel Knight, The Binding of Issac, and Terraria should not be problem. Half Life 1 & 2 and Portal 1 & 2 should not be a problem at all. League of Legends is yet another game you can play; though it is not on Steam. You can even play Fallout 3 (2008), Fallout: New Vegas (2010), TES IV: Oblivion (2006) and TES V: Skyrim (2011). Though Fallout 4 would be a big no.

The least expensive laptop with a dedicated GPU is the following Acer for $600. Basically has the same specs as the above Asus, but it also has a "mainstream" nVidia mx150 which is roughly between the performance of the GTX 950m and GTX 960m "gaming GPUs" from 2016.

https/www.amazon.com/Acer-Aspire-i5-8250U-GeForce-E5-576G-5762/dp/B075FLBJV7/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1532983698&sr=1-1&keywords=i5-8250u+mx150

If you want a $500 laptop with a dedicated GPU, then you will need to look at used / refurbished laptops.