Gaming Laptop?

You can get a good laptop for 500 no doubt, but you cant get a "GAMING" laptop for 500.

Asus K53S. Its a little bit less than 600 and can play Skyrim on high.

Get an alienware laptop with an nvidia geforce installed and you should be good. :)

Laptop and gaming? Really?

What a Radeon fangirl...

Hmm curious myself... Also daydreaming about owning a laptop which will play Skyrim, or anything at all, since my laptop broke :) I've been looking at the Lenovo IdeaPad sales, particularly the Lenovo IdeaPad Y580 209945U $999 shipped. Its out of your ideal price and has an nvidia graphics card. There may be a lower priced Y580 model. I am not sure how these are for gaming, but the specs look nice. Are Nvidia graphics cards a poor option for gaming on laptops ?
A good site for all sales is http://www.dealighted.com . It is a long thread so you will want to use the search option. Occasionally gaming laptop deals appear, followed by detailed debates by members regarding whether they are any good or not. :) Its also a good place to catch Steam and games sales...

don't get a laptop,just get a desktop with a quad core and a hd 6950 with 4gb ram

I recently got a new laptop myself, it can play skyrim on high, not sure about sims 3 though, and it's not nvidia or alienware. Cost me About £350, so you should be able to get one for the price range you're looking at. It's a HP probook 4530s.

Asus A43TK.

Just build a desktop. You can get more power for less money. Laptops are not made for gaming, and most people who want "gaming" laptops don't ever even move it around and have it sitting on a table all the time or sit on a loveseat or something with it.

And besides, why would you want to play those terrible games?

Find a late-model Dell XPS. Most of the ones from last year sport great hardware but are being replaced by 3rd-gen Intel chipped models.

Actually, I do have a couple of suggestions for you, but they go above 600$ (they're more in the 500-600 Euro category rather than the 500-600$ one).

The Lenovo 17.3'' IdeaPad G770A sports a decent Sandy i5 proc at 2500MHz which you can OC to about 3100MHz, 8GB (2*4096) DDR3 RAM at 1333MHz and a 500GB 5400RPM HDD, with a RadeonHD 6370M with 2048MB of dedicated DDR3 memory, which means it should rise to the task decently.

Alternatively, the Asus 15.6'' K53SM has the same-gen i5 as the above, has 4GB DDR3 RAM and a 1TB HDD at 5400RPM, but an nVidia GeForce GT 630M with 2048MB of dedicated video memory. The problems with this one are that it overheats very quickly and it has an nVidia graphics card, which you don't want, but you should be able to find similar Asus models with Radeon instead, I'm just talking price ranges here.

Both of these are, nevertheless, quite low-tier gaming laptops, and even so, they cost around 600 Euro or 700+ dollars. But they will get you what you need.

EDIT: Oh, yeah, and if you do decide on buying a low- or even medium-tier gaming laptop, also think about investing in a decent external cooling system, as most often the ones they come with are utter crap. It's quite hard to even get your hands on a top-shelf model that doesn't have heating problems, but you do get the occasional one there.

Slickdeals.net Computer Deals will occasionally post an adequate laptop with the specs and price range you are looking to buy. You'll probably have better luck checking their front page or their Hot Deals forum since not all deals make it to the Computer Deals section. Most of the deals that get posted on their front page are to major online retailers.

Beware though, the site does post stuff other than just computer deals. I know I've found myself buying things I didn't need just because I thought the deal was too good to pass up.

And of course the NotebookCheck Comparison of Laptop Graphics Cards page is an invaluable tool for gauging the GPU when purchasing a gaming laptop.

If you're willing to go to $700, an HP dv6-6047 cl with a i7-2630QM 2.00 GHz processor and a 1 GB radeon hd 6770, can play Skyrim maxed out at roughly 40-50 fps before the hd pack and about 30-40 with it. The RAM on it is 8 GB and has 1 TB of hard drive.

ASUS K52DR

i know you said no nvidia but this can run bf3 at medium at about 30fps http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215411

http://www.shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/Laptops/HP-Pavilion/B5S11UA?HP-Pavilion-dv6-7010us-Entertainment-Notebook-PC I run all my games on this fine with no problems at medium settings

Toshiba Satellite A500

Woah $500-$600 for a gaming laptop..............I would get within the $700-$800 minimum range because you won't find a reasonable processor for that cheap. Also remember that a laptop for $700-$800 is already outdated, so this time next year it will be leaning more towards becoming an expensive paper weight :S

If it was me, I would save up more and get a decent laptop for a higher price down the line, but I don't know your situation.

I went for Asus UX32VD, portability is the king screw the gaming. Sadly it isn't cheap... Have a desktop too...

Gaming laptop....such a good joke, every time I hear it.

Can someone just quickly tell me if the Lenovo G780 2182 is a good laptop?
I don't want to play current gen games, but maybe Morrowind/Deus ex. Possibly Magicka or something like that too.

In that price range you can also take a look at Asus X54HR

I'd go for HP Pavillion Dv6, sure, it's got some problems (you need to clean it every month or else your computer WILL fk up) but it can run Skyrim on high... btw, I'm using it and I got it for... 500€ ish

In december 2011 I bought myself an Lenovo Z570 with nVidia Gt 540M graphics :) will never regret this :)

Laptops aren't made for gaming (except mid and high-end Alienware ones). With most of the laptops you won't be able to play anything more than Lemmings (which is actually really good game). Take a look at Asus. They have good laptops with decent prices. Maybe Asus X54HR or something around that. Maybe Asus A55VM (It has Ivy Bridge i5 CPU). It will cost more but it will be better. Of course - if it's out of your price range then stay with i3 and something like that. And what's wrong with Nvidia? For laptop Nvidia is better than ATI because it will work faster most of the times (for example Nvidia GeForce GT 630M is faster than HD7470M and they are in same price range).