Mid Range laptop for ?700 that can do some games

[capcom_suicide]

Hi,

I need to buy the mother in law a laptop, but she wants to be able to let the grandkids play a game or two. (Sim's etc)

Budget is £700

I see a lot of mid range machines have the ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5470 GPU. Is that any good for a mid range?

Dell do the following for £700:

Intel i5-450m (2.4ghz quad core, turbo mode 2.66Ghz)
15,6 " LED-LCD
4GB 1333Mhz RAM
360GB HDD
ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5470 GPU

I doubt this is going to manage much, but maybe games on "Low" settings?

Would this be as good as an Xbox360 visually?

I know it will do the office/windows/web just fine.

If I just tell her "No" to being able to play games, I can get the same thing with inbuild GPU for £100 less, so I don't see the point of doing this unless the ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5470 GPU can manage to play recent games.

As always, thanks for the advice guys!

EDIT:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Computer-Games-on-Laptop-Graphic-Cards.13849.0.html

It's a heap of junk.

Any better systems for £700, or suggestions?

[abigsmurf]

Need to go above that really for any significant gaming (although sims is pretty low intensity)

Check out this one for £701:

http://www.dabs.com/products/toshiba-l670-14m-ci3-330-2gb-320-w7pro-70Y2.html?refs=22

You won't get a better graphics chip for that price. That'll run most things.

Only downside is 2gb of ram which is utterly bizzare for a laptop so well specced otherwise.

A laptop with a slightly slower (but still good) GPU with a more sensable amount of ram:

http://www.dabs.com/products/samsung-r780-core-i3-350m---4gb-500gb-17-3--hd16-9-led-screen-windows7-home-premium--64-bit--laptop-72T2.html?refs=22

(if you shop around for that one, pay attention to the GPU, most builds of that only have a 310m)

http://www.notebookcheck.net/ <- great site for comparing GPUs