I've been looking for a laptop for college and I only do some gaming (Civ 5, FarCry3). I also do some small video editing.
My real question is should I stray away from intergrated graphics like the Intel 4000 or find a dedicated card?
I've been looking at the Lenovo U410 Ultrabook. http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/u-series/u410-ultrabook/ . It has a lot of what I'm looking for.. SSD Cache, i7, dedicated graphics NVIDIA GeForce 710M, and 8gb RAM, Also it isn't bulky like a true gaming laptop which is pretty important to me. Also, it fits my $800 budget.
Any recommendations would really help.
If you really want to game on your laptop, then definitely choose one with a dedicated card.
That lenovo U410 looks really good imo, but I haven't been looking around at laptops and ultrabooks atm so there might be better choices (I don't know).
In my experience I regret buying a laptop for gaming. I shouldve bought the one the uni sold for us (because of the service and we do a lot of rendering/modeling/CAD and I'm missing out on the quadro) and buy a seperate desktop for gaming later on. But then again it really depends on what u need to do for college.
Dedicated most certainly if you want to game.
Just a little food for thought... I'm in college and I have a desktop. Just because you're in college doesn't mean you have to have a laptop. Ask yourself how often you'll actually take it somewhere. Some people take their laptop everywhere. Personally, I took paper and a pen to class and kept my laptop at my apartment my whole first semester, when I had a laptop, that is. I'll take an extended lifetime, more quality control, more customization options, and decreased price over portability any day of the week.