In the Market for a Laptop ;o....

[Kongfucius]

A friend of mine recently bought a Toshiba Satellite Pro of some description for pretty much the same kind of uses as you, came with an Intel Core i5 and a mid-range Nvidia GPU (GT 740M or 750M, can't remember which) for about £550. He's very pleased, plays stuff like Far Cry 3 and Portal 2 well at 768p at (what looks to me) better settings than the console versions with higher fps

I also have a Samsung which I like, though I'm not sure what the consensus is like on their build quality - mine feels good but not great, mostly made of plastic, although I prioritised the componants (Core i7, but only Intel's IGP HD 4000 - don't need it to play games) which work well, it's also quiet and cool, cost about £500

Before that I had an older Dell XPS 1530M (now 5 1/2 years old). Still works, but I bust the screen (my fault though), however I did have problems with it - about a year after I bought it it had to go in for major work where most of the innards where replaced (fortunately under warranty though) and after about 3yrs the built in media software did something really weird - I got stuck in it and when I eventually got out of it the day after the partition on the HDD for Windows had disappeared, so I had to reinstall everything which took the best part of 2 days because it wouldn't so what I wanted it to (don't remember specifics). It was also as hot as hell, but then it was more powerful than my Samsung for its day (Core 2 Duo at 2.1GHz + Nvidia GT 8600M). That said its now pretty old, so it may not be representitive of current Dell products, but it has made me wary of them