The laptop that got me through law school appears to be nearing the end of its slow decline into unusability, and I'm ready to replace it. My needs are modest: I use my computer only for internets surfing, video streaming, and some far-from-cutting edge gaming. It's the last of these, along with my relative lack of hardware knowledge, that's making it hard for me to commit to a new computer. Ideally, I don't want to pay more than about $400. The difficulty is that everything I can find in this price range has an integrated graphics card, which I've been led to understand is substantially inferior for gaming. The list of games I plan on playing regularly is as follows:

AoE III
Starcraft II
League of Legends
Minecraft
The Old Republic (maybe)
Half-Life 2-derived games

My basic question is whether I can run these on reasonable (not bare-bones) settings with the integrated cards on the market, whether a comparably priced alternative exists, or whether I'm just going to have to suck it up and shell out another couple hundred. A secondary question is whether, based on the answer to the first one, there are any specific recommendations. Sorry to waste all your time with what probably seems like a very basic inquiry, but it's been awhile since I've done this and I wasn't satisfied with the results of my own research.

My guess is that better Intel (HD4000) or AMD APU's (HD755x or better) would handle any of those games fine at typical laptop resolutions something like 1366x768. If you by some miracle your $400 laptop supports 1080p or your trying to run at those resolutions on an external monitor then you will have to make some significant graphic quality compromises. An i3 with HD4000 or A8/A10 with HD76xx are probably your best bets for that price.

Even an HD4000 will struggle with many of those games, especially at the $400 range, as they won't even be the full-speed version of it.

An HD4000 will run, on LOW SETTINGS, Starcraft 2. That's probably the most pressing thing on there. The Old Republic is hard to say, as it's an MMO, where framerates can appear great at first, but then drop like a rock in intense environments. Minecraft is also deceptively hard on slower cards, especially with the fancy graphics setting.

That said, I think you'll be way better off getting something at least $700, if you don't want to be tossing it in a year or two. $400 is just incredibly cheap for anything other than bare minimum office/browsing or giving to a kid.

Edit: Forgot to mention, the HD5000 is a significant jump in speed, which is only on the newest Haswell CPUs. Might be worth waiting until you can get one of those if you can't spend more.

I have a Thinkpad x230 with i5-3210M and a lot of games run fine on it. But I'm playing with a 1366x768 resolution and not fullest details. With that, Source games run very well and so do Unreal Engine 3 games (Dishonored, the Batman games, etc.). I played Rage as well, and it runs great minus the texture popping.

The HD5000 seems worth the wait for gaming though. I've had laptops with dedicated graphic cards, and I always had problems with heat. With the HD4000, my x230 does get heated up with more intensive games but not hot hot. I use the laptop for CAD and Solidworks work, so the HD4000 is capable for that so far.

Anecdotal, I know.

Thanks for the advice, guys. While I wouldn't say I'm planning to get rid of this new computer in a couple of years, I do plan to buy a desktop once I'm in a more permanent residence, and once that happens I expect I'll use this laptop far less for gaming.

With that in mind, a friend was able to locate this for me and it seems to check all the boxes, including a dedicated graphics card:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215663

Any thoughts?

Well I mean, it's an Acer. You get what you pay for.

Don't get excited just because it has a dedicated GPU. The GPU is still pretty awful, nearly equal with the HD5000 integrated chipset. Also what Emon said. You'll probably want to get rid of that laptop in two years no matter what you're using it for, unless you have a high tolerance for slow browsing/load times on everything. It's an Acer, it's an AMD CPU, and it's $450. You're not exactly getting much out of it.

Gotcha. I just have trouble justifying spending much on what's going to be a transitional/secondary computer that, at its best, only needs to run the games listed above. For comparison, I've had my Dell Studio for six years. Is the Acer really going to deteriorate that much faster?

I looked into some slightly higher-priced options, but I'm not sure what they buy me. In particular, I'm not liking what I'm reading about the GPU on the first, but again, my requirements in that department aren't high.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230987

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834216539

That second laptop should be a gigantic improvement over the rest. It'll also play almost any game at medium settings, which is a huge step above the others you've linked (they'd barely manage Low). Not to mention, it should stand to last a lot longer and won't be slow to start with.

Sounds like we have a winner, then. Thanks again for all the advice.

Anecdotal, but: my friend's Acer laptop suffered from a poorly constructed power connector that, within a year or two after the purchase of the laptop, had to be heated with an iron to re-solder the failed solder joint.

I've only heard bad things about Acer....

Too bad it runs Windows 8. Not that you can avoid that at this point....

Nice choice with the Toshiba, a GT740M should handle 1366x768 pretty well. If you were going to get something with a dedicated GPU, I'm glad you picked an Intel CPU. While an A8/A10 is well balanced with it's APU, they are definitely much weaker CPU's than their Intel counterparts especially at lower clockspeeds like 1.9ghz. Asking a slow A8 to push a dedicated GPU will start showing an obvious CPU bottleneck. And Reverend Jones, I gotta agree with you. I'm using my Win8 laptop now while one vacation and I'm hating it. I wish Win8 was smarter at separating the Desktop and Metro portions of it's UI. Like if I'm working on the desktop and I click to view an image file, by default it launches a metro app. Sure it's an easy fix to reassign the default application for certain filetypes, but why didn't this sort of Out-of-the-Box behavior bother anyone at Microsoft. I can't wait to return to my Win7 desktop.

Honestly, once you turn off all the stupid **** with Windows 8, it's fine. The underlying improvements to the system are well worth the aggravation up front. Seriously, my system boots/reboots in nearly half the time, task manager is way better now, windows updates are less annoying, and they've improved the DWM to not fall back to XP-style for old apps. Oh yeah, and they also dramatically improved Remote Desktop's performance, which is awesome for me.

You should just open up the old laptop and solder a bunch of wires into random places that look powerful. That usually works better than buying a new one.

Install Gentoo.

*compile Gentoo. One does not simply install Gentoo.