Welcome to the PCgaming tribe!

The most important thing to check when buying a laptop gaming machine is the graphics card. Laptop companies often skimp rather heavily on the graphics card because of their enormous power, space, and heat dissipation needs (all great enemies to the portable form factor).

I find tomshardware to be the best source on PC hardware and they keep a regularly updated hierarchy chart to make it easy to know what you're getting. Refer to http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html The entries labelled discrete are non-laptop graphics cards. As you can see, currently NVIDIA has the best laptop graphics card, the geforce gtx 980m. With your budget I would suggest aiming for a laptop that has one of these upper end GPUs. At the upper range of your budget you can probably afford a 970m. For example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834232202

I think there isn't much to be done with the downvote system for topics, despite the possibility for abuse, it's a necessary part of the system.

However, I would love to see a rethink of how comments are displayed:

Imagine instead of one comment column that is ordered by "most upvoted" or "highest upvote to downvote ratio" (what I assume is the current "best" filter) , there are two columns of comments. One column will be the popular/best column, using the ordering similar to the current filter, and the other column would be dissenting opinions ordered by upvotes but not downvotes.

Let me give an example with some possible upvotes/downvotes.

Here is a list of comments with upvotes/downvotes:

15/6, 32/74, 6/9, 54/32, 10/15, 12/12, 1/20, 5/7, 16/5, 20/30

The current filter would order them like by the best ratio:

16/5, 15/6, 54/32, 12/12, 5/7, 20/30, 10/15, 6/9, 32/74, 1/20

The new system would display like this:

Column 1: 16/5, 15/6, 54/32, 12/12, 5/7

Column 2: 32/74, 20/30, 10/15, 6/9, 1/20

You can think of this new column as a dissenting opinion column, the truly inane comments still get pushed to the bottom like the 1/20, but the controversial 32/74 comment is quite as it should be, displaying prominently.

The best way I can describe the benefit of this is a reduction in the "echo chamber" effect, that being the propensity for these sites to bury dissenting opinions.