Just some additional advice, not to undermine Hybrid but I would never buy any refurbished or open box equipment, especially if you can afford not to.

For refurbished equipment, its safe to assume there's a reason why it had to be refurbished (dead on arrival, some parts malfunctioned, etc), and I don't like have to deal with that burden down the road.

Open box may be a bit safer, but I don't have any experience with that.

I prefer Toshiba, Sony or Lenovo for laptops, as Dell laptops that I've seen haven't been too hot. I'd say $1000 is a good place to aim, but when I was looking for a Lenovo gaming laptop a little while ago, I found one on slickdeals that was $600 - $700 and had some pretty impressive specs for the time (4GB RAM, dedicated video card, HDMI, pretty nice screen res, etc).

Instead I decided to build my own custom PC for gaming, and to get a laptop for more casual purposes / work.

Just my two cents.

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