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
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