Hello, everyone:

I'm looking for a good laptop for making 3D games on. I primarily work with Unity3D (like the rest of the world) as my main middleware game development program and Blender for my 3D model art, which is usually very low-poly due to my modelling skills (or lack thereof). My current laptop is having some very intersting issues. For example, it sometimes takes about 30 minutes to change to a different tab on Chrome. Here are the general properties for the computer I'm looking for:

• between $400 - $500 in price
• around 13"-15" wide (my back's been killing me with carrying around my current laptop)
• uses either Nvidia or AMD graphics (I've heard Intel is not good for games)
• has a HDMI port
• can run Saints Row the Third at low or medium settings at around 60 fps (I heard that game's pretty great)
• NOT an HP computer (not a fan of these computers, thanks to my experience with my current laptop)

I'm not so concerned about HD space or memory, as most laptops come with a minimum of 500 GB of HD space and 4GB of memory these days.

If anyone can help me out with this, I would much appreciate it.

actually i would say HP is usually one of the nicer ones overall

dont forget, other companies make what's inside the laptop, all the brands are just case designs (simplified description)

i want to know more about your current laptop actually, did you imply it's 17"?

$400-500 is... a problem if you want to play games, but maybe you might find an AMD APU based laptop, 1366x768, etc

$400-500 is a problem for just running Blender and Unity. Your rendering times are going to be awful, and your screen size is going to be insufficient. Consider upping your budget, or getting a desktop instead.

That price range isn't going to cut it for doing proper game-development on a laptop. You would need to increase your projected spending range a good bit, and I don't think laptops are ideal for serious game work (maybe touch-ups and such). I say take that budget, inflate it a little, and use that money to build a desktop instead. I had the same idea before, and got a nice laptop for video production/effects/rendering, but it cost way too much and quickly became ineffective over time. I learned my lesson then, bought parts to build a nice desktop for less, and it was a vastly better investment.

You won't get better value than Clevo/Sager/etc. Their build quality and specs are excellent for the price. $400-500 is not enough for what you want.

You may want to try fixing up your old laptop (unless its super duper old) and using that for portability while picking up a low end desktop for your needs. $400-500 isn't going to help you much though if you want a good video card and Windows 7/8. The trick is you will probably need a decent monitor to go with it which will eat up about half that budget. If you have a 1080p monitor already it would go a long way.

http://www.logicalincrements.com/

You could get an okay computer for gaming at around $500-600. That's not including Mouse and Keyboard (Which are super cheap), speakers and a monitor. KB/M plus sound plus monitor plus OS (you could go with linux of course, but most people are hesitant for obvious reasons) will run you $300+. That okay computer would not be very future proofed either.

As for Saint's Row the Third is wants some fairly strong hardware so even at medium you will need at least a 7790/650 ti Boost to get 60 fps solid. My 7850 can't run Saint's Row 3 at full settings even at 30 fps in some areas.

For that $800 you could get a laptop with a pretend video card in it like a 620M (seriously why do those even exist) and an i5. It may be able to do light game stuff, but your 3D games will look like Playstation 2 games.

Because laptop manufacturers are evil they will likely give you something with the rendering power of an ice cream sandwich for $500. It will also come with the added benefit of catching itself on fire.

I would not waste money on a development machine, be it a desktop or a laptop that only has 4GB of memory, even just for running Visual Studio for coding for example. Your OP is confusing because you complain of Chrome tabs taking ages to switch but then your not worried about memory? It's RAM that is likely to be causing this.

This is also where you're gonna bottleneck hard if you want to do 3D rendering. At a minimum you should have 8GB's of RAM but if I were you, 12GB's would be the lowest I'd settle for.