disolitude on 08 February 2013
Your best bet is to look for sales.
I've seen laptops under 500 that had Nvidia GT 640m and even a nice Samsung A10 APU + 7670m GPU in crossfire for 599. Best buy clears a lot of laptops.
Something like this would give you a good Skyrim experience, just got to find it on sale -
http://www.bestbuy.ca/en-CA/product/asus-asus-k-series-k75de-17-3-laptop-black-amd-a10-4600m-750gb-hdd-8gb-ram-windows-8-k75de-bh01-cb/10227299.aspx?path=bd22c2c7d5eae21c130bde5afe444b32en02
