Fennis

A dedicated graphics card is much more important than worrying about an i7 processor. An i5 will game just as well. What is more important is that you have 4GB ram and a dedicated graphics card with decent power. Newegg is a good place to start as you can filter out the ones without a dedicated card and then you can narrow down to your price range and preference. There are some nice laptops there for under 1k that offer dual/sli dedicated cards which will give you plenty of power for SimCity and anything else you can throw at it.

There is a lot of misinformation here. Windows 8 and SimCity work fine. I have used it throughout each beta and now when I can actually get into a server it plays just as it would on any Windows 7 box. In fact, every game I've played before on Windows 7 works on 8. There seem to be no compatibility issues that I have come across yet. If you are running into issues on 8, its most likely something with your computer, its hardware, or a driver issue.

What was the point of beta then, especially the round last week which was stated entirely for the purpose of figuring out how to handle a heavy server load?