Okay thank you I will look on Ebay or Craigslist I did not think of that. as for games I wish to play Minecraft and Minetest and I was hoping to get a laptop that supports OpenGL 4.4 or 3.3
As a crazy and probably not very recommendable option (especially if you can't risk wasting money) I've seen that you can get a lot of cheap laptop motherboard on ebay or even aliexpress. This however requires that you buy all the other stuff separately, which are:
- Charger
- LCD
- Base housing
- LCD Housing
- Keyboard
- Fan and heatsink
- HDD
- RAM
- Antennas and wifi adapter
- Bluetooth adapter and antennas (?)
- ++
This will make it hard to stay within the 100$ budget, but I thought I'd share this idea nevertheless. Also when looking at the motherboards do check that the pictures have the cpu on the motherboard as these are very often removed and sold separately.
A quick search on ebay for "Laptop motherboard nvidia" gave me this
Dell XPS L412z with i5 2450M 2,4ghz with an Nvidia gt 520m (I believe that's the gpu from looking up the model) for 19,27$.
The site
notebookcheck.net is great for finding out what you can expect from your graphics card in terms of fps in games (scroll down to the bottom of the site. This is for the above mentioned
gt520m. Still, note that few reported benchmarks for a game means that you can't necessarily trust the result 100% to be representable for the gpu (look at the cpu as well). However, I would think that people who go through the lengths of publishing their results are also people who maintain their laptops/pcs better than your average consumer.
A tip would be to check dissassembly videos online (:youtube) to see if there are extra circuit boards that come with the motherboard (of course you can drop buying any dvd-roms or other optional stuff laptops tend to come with.)
Again, I would not really recommend this for you in your case especially since there are so many pitfalls (like laptops needing speical types of hdd connections, extra cables for power supply etc.). This is more something I would do as a fun experiment, but it would be interesting to hear what others in this thread might say. Maybe you know someone who has a "broken" laptop that just needs a new housing (which can often costs around 50$).