GPU will definitely be the most important consideration, although I'm not sure less than $500 is realistic for a development laptop. Usually you spend extra on development computers so you can save time. Getting a cheaper development machine means you'll need to run release builds instead of debug builds far more often, and that's harder for debugging. You'll also have to optimize earlier and more often, which will probably lead to development effort that later gets thrown away anyways.
Fully agree with this. +1
The GPU might not be the most important piece, but it's definitely important. The other points richardurich made are also true.
Thank you all for your input, they are very insightful. Just curious why everybody here is favoring AMD, instead of Intel. I asked my brother for his input and he said intel, but I am eager to here your opinions on the matter.
Intel makes fantastic CPUs. But when it comes to GPUs, NVidia and AMD have always dominated.
Many many laptops come backed with Intel GPUs, which are usually the bare basic 'Yes I have a GPU' card checkbox. Unfortunately, they are pretty poor chips that are integrated into the motherboard directly and very underpowered. Intel might make more expensive GPUs as well, but the built-in GPUs on laptops are infamous - which isn't a problem for web surfacing, emailing, and word processing that most consumers do (though I find on cheaper laptops they tend to overheat when watching Netflix for extended duration).
As a matter of personal preference, I prefer desktops - but other developers find laptops to suit them just fine.
I'm not very well versed on hardware - recently my brother asked me to find one for him, so I got one on sale at Newegg Flash for $600 (25% off). Others give their advice and opinions in this thread where I was asking about it.
When developing games, you don't need a super-duperly expensive videocard, but you should at least get a real videocard in the laptop instead of an "integrated" videocard that, as I mentioned, overheats when running videos too long. Unfortunately, that does increase the cost of the laptop slightly, and you might be hard-pressed to find one for sub-$500.
A good amount of RAM is important - but it seems like RAM is one of the marketing points for laptops these days, so even cheap laptops have plenty of RAM (most I see have 6-8GB in them) - if you have more than 4GB, that's fine for basic game development as long as you aren't doing heavy video editing and things like that. I only have 3 GB, without any problems - except when editing images with huge resolutions (10,000 x 10,000 and multiple layers - but that's unusual unless you are an artist working in really high definition).
