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.
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.
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...
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.
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.