Oh god the prices are inflated to hell and back . Not really , but damn I ' m sorry . Ok . Back to helping . I ' d try to get from MSY , despite my inner UIUX person screaming fix your fucking ad it looks like a newspaper ad from the 90 s , because of two reasons . Bigger listed selection , slightly more variety , and slightly better prices for the hardware . In terms of getting something that has enough hardware power to last more than a year and a half , get anything within your budget in Performance 4 ' s group g basically the Acer Nitro ' s , ASUS GL , and I think something else . In terms of staying on lower end of budget , I can ' t say much . There ' s so much variance in that weird $ 1300 AUD area that leads to either an underpowered laptop like getting a cheapo 940 Mx or meh 950 M or something more ideal but compromising somewhere Acer is not known for highest quality many places . Really , anything in the first two rows of Performance 4 ' s group page 7 of their PDF should be good for some time . Sorry you ' re stuck with overpriced as fuck machines . $ 1000 USD can get you quite a lot these days in terms of computing power . Apparently $ 1350 AUD doesn ' t , evidenced by these ads . Good luck ! EDIT forgot something ! Some of those laptops in Performance 4 aren ' t going to be good at cooling themselves off efficiently so they might throttle clock speeds back to cool down a little or , like my laptop , engage liftoff and continue pushing everything full throttle . A good investment if you can find a decent one for cheap might be a laptop cooling pad . These are basically a couple large fans in a laptop padstand to pull hot air away and encourage cooler air to come through . If you want , you can build your own using whatever you want to if you have working but not used computer fans . Supply sufficient current and BAM working cooling pad . I was able to get one from TreeNewBee for $ 20 USD , maybe you can find one for a similarly low cost ?