I'm looking for a ~$800 laptop for my brother, primarily for playing computer games (ugh, gaming on laptops).

He can tweak the settings down as needed, but being a Call of Duty fan, will no doubt want to play CoD: Ghosts (though he can lower the settings).

It's difficult to find a good laptop for gaming for such a low price. Heck, it's difficult to find a good laptop for gaming (Full stop).

Anyways, I'm looking at this laptop for him - here are my concerns:

• The i7 core doesn't mention how many cores it has. But the model number (3630QM) implies that it's a quad core.
• It's from a brand I'm not personally familiar (MSI). I've never had a MSI laptop, and until now I've never even heard of them. (But wikipedia says they are huge producers of motherboards and such).
• The videocard is a NVIDIA GeForce GT 645M, which doesn't seem to be the fastest silicon in the drawer.

Is this a reasonable laptop, all things considered? What do you think about the MSI brand?

MSI is a thing if you're into building your own gaming rig. I've never used one of their laptops, but I've used their motherboards before. Not bad stuff. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if their laptops were decent too. Also, the Q in the i7 model number means quad. Or at least it has for every one I've seen. I don't really keep up like I used to, but I assume it's still the same.

You're probably not going to find much better than something like that given the price range and it being a laptop. My other recently got a Dell Inspiron 17RSE with a 650M for $750, but it was also $150 off at the time. The rest of the hardware is similar to what that has, I believe. You'd have to find a sale to do better.

Thanks. Ordered it, after discussing it with some others and doing some more research.

If anyone else is interested in one, I can't vouch for their overall quality, but the price for that hardware is fantastic, at $600 on Newegg for the next 4 days (normally $830).

I would have gone with a Clevo. Faster CPU (albeit fewer cores), faster GPU, and much better screen.

The way I understand it, it works like this

You'd be right for desktop models, but current mobile i7 have dual core versions. Almost all mobile i5 are dual core, too.

No offence intended, but let's be honest here... the people who claim it's such a big deal to play games on laptops are people who've never played games on high-end laptops.

I went from only having stationary computer rigs to a G74SX and I've never been happier. I can't tell much difference in performance, and the keyboard is huge.

- You can and SHOULD always look up information on the components different resellers list for products. Because resellers always have motive to make everything sound better than they are and sometimes they just borderline lie and live out "details" in their benefit. Intel has good site for their products: http://ark.intel.com/products/71459/

- MSI should be one of the "quality" manufacturers, although they are mostly known for motherboards at least around where I live.

- The most important factor in any laptop, especially gaming laptops for me is the warranty. Because they will be constantly used near their peak performance, these machines will overheat, they will get cluttered with dust and hair, they will likely have a vital component break after certain amount of years because of all of that. When your motherboard, processor or graphics card breaks beyond what you can repair yourself the machine is essentially worthless if you don't have a warranty because repairing it with all the shipping will take months and cost several hundred dollars minimum depending on the components and your location. In my country you can get a 3 year warranty at best when you buy from certain reseller, some manufacturers even offer warranty extensions beyond that.

I had a semi-gaming laptop (800 euros) break some 4 years ago ONE month after warranty had expired. GPU fried because of overheating, I diagnosed. It was a good brand (Asus) with 2 years warranty but what can you do when it's just expired. Asked around for estimates and they totalled some 550 euros including shipping, repairs and new components, data loss of course. For a machine that had no further warranty and was couple years old, I could have grabbed a new and better laptop with full warranty in a store for that price. But I actually decided to take a good break from gaming back then.

Seeing you already purchased something I can but wish you good luck with it

EDIT: Also note about AMD: Their processors have a history of heating more than Intel although they tend to pack more power for the price. After this lesson in thermal effects I'm considering my next processor value more carefully. I don't know if AMD has improved on the subject, it is quite possible they have but these things tend to haunt the average consumer for a long time which is why we have so strong AMD vs Intel and Nvidia vs Ati camps :)