I just won an ebay auction for a Toshiba Satellite quad core L855D-S5220 A8-4500m 6gb ddr3 with Radeon 7640G graphics & 650 gb hard drive and windows 7 in very good condition for [$280 and $15 shipping]!!! (you have to do quite a bit of research on ebay, the seller's rating, return policy, the fine print of what Exactly you are getting, how to snipe auctions, etc!!) If you are patient you can get what you want there! Took me a little over of week of methodically doing research, checking newegg, fry's, walmart, tomshardware, notebookcheck.net, and peer reviews of different brands to familiarise myself with whats what out there and what all of the techno-jargon means with memory types, finding out that the HP's dv6 and dv8 series might seem attractive but always overheat, and how intel stacks up vs amd in terms of price and power. Oh yeah, I like to find a laptop model or graphics card model and type that into youtube along with the word skyrim or some other highly demanding game to see what people have posted there, they will tell you all about their system, how many frames per second, thats also a pretty good resource.
Regards-