What would you recommend for a gaming laptop, the budget is around $500

So I just wanted to know which of these laptops would be best for the money http://pc4u.org/best-cheap-gaming-laptop-under-500-dollars/

Hard to call a laptop at that price range a "gaming" laptop,I bought mine 2 years ago for 700€ used (that model new close to 1000€) and it's still not really a gaming laptop. I mean,I can still run games like GTA4 on quite high settings on FullHD resoluton,it still lacks the power to run for example Asetto Corsa on decent settings (where 2.5GHz i5 CPU as bottleneck suspected).

That said,I would vote for the first ACER,just because of that GPU,allthough CPU seems like could be a bit weaker part of it,which is still something you can easily upgrade if you're ready to spend extra money later. Then again - I'm no IT specialist,could be that I'm not the best opinion sharer... :P

Not much can be done about the CPU after buying an i5, due to chipset differences it's not possible to replace it with an i7 for example. Can increase clock speed but that doesn't give any real extra performance. However, the 4th and 5th generation are quite strong anyway so I think an i5 is enough CPU power for most people.

GPU, yeah, thats quite important. With this selection I would go for the first one with 840M. Although I probably would go for second handed and better specs, especially screen wise. The resolutions of these machines are quite low. But not important if you plan to use an external monitor.