I'm looking to buy a new gaming laptop for around $800. Anyone know a good one?

Must it be a laptop? You can get a desktop that performs better and for a similar price.

Yes, it must be a laptop.

What screen size? Do you care about battery life?

Not much in the way of real gaming laptops without stretching the budget a little, or a lot. How well do you realistically want to run games?

1366x768, or somewhere around there would be nice. Battery life doesn't matter to me very much.

I want to run games smoothly on medium-high settings. I'm not looking for super-ultra high graphics on games.

By screen size I meant 15", 17", and whatnot, if you have a preference. But, the resolution helps too, as you'll have a lot more options if you don't insist on running games at 1080p.

Oh, I'm not too sure. 14" or higher is good, I think.

And how solid is that budget? You might have to push it a bit to get something new with a decent gaming GPU. Also, Nvidia and ATI will have their new line of mobile GPU's coming out pretty soon, how long are you able to wait before buying?

I could bring up the budget if I have to, maybe. And I'm looking to buy sometime this month (or early next month). The sooner I can, the better.

Some ideas:
http://www.amazon.com/G53SW-XA1-Republic-Gamers-15-6-Inch-Gaming/dp/B004X5XL3Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1324798678&sr=8-1

http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np5165-clevo-w150hr-p-3063.html

http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np5160-clevo-w150hn-p-2999.html

Those are in descending order of power. The Sagers give you some more customization options, but you do have to pay for an OS. To get a better idea how the GPU's will perform, I'd look at notebookcheck.net reviews, as they usually list relative performance in a variety of games.

Alright, thanks. I'll check them out. But I'm wondering, what is the whole "turbo boost" thing on the first link?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230132

i5 2430 @ 2.4 with turbo to 3.0, 6GB of RAM, and a GeForce GT 540M. 15.6" screen with a 1366x768 resolution. I have the same laptop except I don't game on it so I got an integrated Intel HD 3000 chipset to extend battery life.

Pretty solid so far, but the 5400RPM seems slow after using my desktop. And it has a fair bit of ASUS bloatware and some annoying anti-virus that you have to get rid of.

And mine actually has 2 HDDs adding up to 640GB as opposed to a single 640GB drive as would seem to be implied by the product description, so you could backup to the second drive if you store something important and don't want to backup externally.

That looks like a good one. Can you play games on high with it?

Edit: Looks like it's out of stock. Any idea when/if they will get more of them?

Turbo boost is a feature of most intel processors that allows them to run above their base frequency when needed as long as they stay within certain power and thermal limitations. The CPU also reaches a higher clock speed when less cores are in use, aiding performance in applications that don't utilize multiple cores that would otherwise see lackluster performance because of the relatively low clock speeds of most mobile processors. In short, the CPU can overclock itself on the fly when extra processing power is required.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215200 is this computer any good?

Well, I can't, because I have the integrated GPU. It'll obviously be different with a 540, and the processor may give you some issues, but the reviews say it runs most games high/ultra.

Does anyone know? Looks pretty good to me, but I don't know about the 1900x600 resolution. Will I still be able to play at 1366x768 with a 17" screen at full screen (without black space)?

Personally, I would avoid Acers. Yet to meet someone who has been happy with their Acer two years down the road (and Acer's support is horrible the few times I've dealt with it).

I'd recommend:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230133

It's cheaper, and you'll get just about the same performance as what that Acer potentially offers as IIRC, the 6650M and the 540M are pretty close to each other in benchmarks. It'll also probably be a bit lighter than the Acer, and smaller screen should improve battery life since the screen is one of the biggest drain on the battery.

I had an Acer for more than two years, and I've pretty much been happy down the road.

I'm not sure about that ASUS. I'll probably buy the Acer soon, unless I can find something better.