Well, I use an Acer gaming laptop as it gives me the flexibility to play at my desk, on the settee, or in bed as I feel like, plus as you say it’s usable for other things. I’m in the UK, but I think the price was the equivalent of around your max spend if you’re talking USD, as I got an “off the shelf” configuration in a sale. But I think sales tax here is higher too.

I’ve never tried to update the graphics card, but I guess it would be feasible. I did add more RAM, which was cheaper to buy separately than pay more for a custom build laptop.

I’ve had my current gaming laptop for a couple of years, and my previous (Samsung) one lasted me nearly seven before it became incapable of running games I wanted to play, by which time other components were end of life anyway (again, I added RAM to that and also upgraded the hard drive to SSD, but it was actually the keyboard breaking with replacements no longer available that was its final death knell!). So while I probably don’t play the most resource intensive games, I don’t think hardware gets outpaced nearly as quickly as it used to, and the investment in gaming laptops can therefore pay off.

But that’s just what suits me!

(I do have a wireless games controller that I can use with my laptop, by the way, but I tend to use mouse and keyboard for most games.)

"You may call it 'nonsense' if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!"