At $500 you're not getting a laptop that can play the game better than what you have now.Â
What you want at that price is a budget desktop gaming machine. There are many, many, many ways to do this, and it's late for me so I can't get into too much detail, but here is one way to go about building your own desktop gaming machine around that price point. Note this wouldn't have an optical drive to start so you'd have to download your games or cannibalize it from your old desktop, your old monitor is likely still usable so I didn't include that in the budget. This would be very up-gradable down the road as well.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/C84Tzy
I chose these parts without considering hardware loyalties or any sort of fanboyism. That sort of subjective preference is something you have to ditch when building on a budget.
Let me be clear that you can definitely do much better than this example build I showed you with some time and research effort. http://www.logicalincrements.com/ is a great place to start.
What you want at that price is a budget desktop gaming machine. There are many, many, many ways to do this, and it's late for me so I can't get into too much detail, but here is one way to go about building your own desktop gaming machine around that price point. Note this wouldn't have an optical drive to start so you'd have to download your games or cannibalize it from your old desktop, your old monitor is likely still usable so I didn't include that in the budget. This would be very up-gradable down the road as well.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/C84Tzy
I chose these parts without considering hardware loyalties or any sort of fanboyism. That sort of subjective preference is something you have to ditch when building on a budget.
Let me be clear that you can definitely do much better than this example build I showed you with some time and research effort. http://www.logicalincrements.com/ is a great place to start.