Looking for advice on buying a cheap affordable gaming laptop.

Hi, I'm a bit new to the laptop game. I am looking for some advice as to buying an affordable gaming laptop. I know that brands like alienware or razer are worth the money and work exceptionally well but they are a bit out of my price range. I've also been looking up alternatives like the dell xps or some asus brands. My main focus is usually the gpu and the hard drive What else should I look for when searching for these?

 

Do you want the best performance for the cheapest? My current HP laptop was $400 with a GT 830M (2GB DDR3) and it works perfectly with a lot of recent games, albeit with lower graphical settings. I've been playing games like Tomb Raider on Medium-High settings on 40+ FPS. Anyway what kind of games are you expecting to play and what's your budget?

 

Usually the best performance is from the higher end laptops like the Asus ROG (Republic of Gaming) series, but they are not cheap at all. You can get better than average gaming performance from an inexpensive system though, like a Lenovo G50 or an Asus X550ZA-WH11 with an AMD A10-7400P Quadcore CPU. It has a Raedon R6 series GPU in it, and has a base speed of 2.5GHZ w/8GB of DDR3L RAM, and a 1 terabyte hard drive, so it has plenty and is a pretty nice system. You can bring it up to 16GB of ram max. Either one of those two should be fine for most games. If you can upgrade either one to 12GB with an extra slot, you'll see a performance gain there or by replacing the 5400rpm standard hard drive with a 250GB or 480GB SSD, and then use the 1TB drive as a backup or external drive with an enclosure.