Buying Laptop: Best Value for P1999?

[Nuggets]

Buying a laptop for gf's bday/valentines day... Want to be able to run EQ while im over there. I'm a big fan of i5 CPU's, but i only know PC, not laptop. Would i be losing anything (on laptop) if i dropped down to i3? I imagine there are probably other factors that are going to bottleneck play before the CPU (shit video card mainly)

Any recomendations? Looking to spend like $300-$400