I've just had the "unfortunate" occasion of being stuck with just my laptop for a week, resources were pretty limited on it but this was the perfect time to see what a budget friendly (390-420 Euro range) laptop can do.

If someone is planning to buy a laptop this may give you an idea what to expect from similar hardware.

The Laptop in Question is an Acer (E 15) E5-573-37BJ, Specs as follows:

Core i3-5005u CPU
Intel HD Graphics 5500 GPU
4GB DDR3L Ram
15.6" Display @ 1366x768 Max
500GB HDD
Linux Mint 18 Mate (came with Win10 bleh)

Small Note: I upgraded the laptop to 16GB, the factory 4GB doesn't do justice (here I simply wanted to max out the memory supported by the CPU but otherwise you should get the same performance if you add another 4GB for a total of 8).

No screenshots or benchmarks, also for a nice fps boost I ran the games using the "vblank_mode=0", games tested were:

1) Pillars of Eternity - 30+ fps, graphics quality set to max. Played the first couple of hours without issues whatsoever.

2) Shadow Warrior 2013 - 25-30 fps on average, all settings low. It's an amazing port and while no 60 fps, it still looks good and very much playable.

3) Trine 2 - All settings on low, fps hovers around 30 fps or possibly more.

4) Victor Vran - Game runs 30fps+ with textues set to medium-high, while keeping the rest of the graphics settings to low. Still very playable.

5) Kept the best for last: Guild Wars 2 with Wine and CSMT - With all settings set to low, it seems to be able to maintain about 25 fps which is not bad for a CPU bound, Windows game, however: FPS tend to dip way too often as you turn the camera or when moving. I have a feeling that the choppy-ness will be gone if the game is ran from an SSD. Considering I have a special bond with this game, I will install an SSD and create a dedicated thread in about 3 weeks when I receive the HDD caddy.

There are other games I haven't mentioned (such as Stardew Valley), but they aren't as power hungry and there's far too many to list.

Conclusion - A laptop with an i3 CPU may not be the cheapest around, but from my experience it offers great performance without breaking your bank. On a better note, the 5005u is slowly being phased out in favor of the 6100u while keeping the price almost the same.

What you should always watch out for is ram expandability, I've seen some Dell laptops with only 1 Ram slot which prevents you from running dual channel memory which is of great benefit to an integrated GPU.

Cheers :-)