They do. If it comes with a discrete GPU, it'll have its own dedicated memory (often either 1GB or 2GB).
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So uh, what will you be using the laptop for? Casual stuff, or will it be a workhorse?
It's important so we know what parts to look out for, you see. If it's a casual machine, you really don't need more than 4GB of RAM, but if it's otherwise, you might benefit from more.
If it's a casual machine, you could most definitely get by with a ultrabook-class CPU, but if it's a workhorse, you might benefit from the performance of a standard CPU.
See what I'm getting at?
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Now my opinion is....
That Toshiba laptop you linked is no good. At the budget you've got, avoid AMD CPUs altogether, as Intel CPUs generally outperform them across the board.
When it comes to brand, I tend to put brand somewhere near the bottom of the list in things to look out for, my belief is all brands have their good and bads. By that, they all make solid high-end stuff and they also make cheap low-quality low-end stuff. It's just the general nature of the business when you need to bring things to the market that need to range from the very low to the very high. I've seen far too many people slag a certain brand off when they bought their cheapest laptop and expect it to perform like their most expensive, and when it doesn't they're all like XYZ brand Is T3h suxXorz donT bUy dEm. =/
Of course, I'm not saying bad brands don't exist, if they legitimately have a bad track record (I know HP did in the past) then, well yeah, it's best to avoid them.
What I
do look for in a laptop though is.....the storage. Forget about CPU and RAM right now, storage is most important at the moment.
The holy grail of storage is like so, from best to worst: SSD, HDD + SSD, HDD.
The storage is the first thing one should look at because it's easily the biggest bottleneck in a PC. There's no point in having the highest-end mobile CPU if you're paring it with a 5400 rpm HDD. A decent CPU plus an SSD would probably give the same overall experience,
if not a better one.
To put it into context, what I'm saying is there really is no point in you spending $700 on the best gear that has a mechanical HDD, if I can get one for $500 that has less decent gear but has SSD caching. My $500 one would feel just as fast as your $700 one (but I would have $200 in my pocket).
This is the main reason why ultrabooks and Macbook Airs are so popular (not price-wise, but performance-wise).
But not everybody can afford a laptop with a SSD, or not everybody can live with the capacity restrictions of an SSD. So we have a hybrid in the form of a HDD paired with a SSD (which is commonly used for caching, so they're commonly small amounts (anywhere from 24 to 40GB)).
To put into context, quick browse on Best Buy gives:
$699 - Lenovo U310 - 13.3", 500GB + 32GB SSD cache
$695 - HP Envy 14 - 14", 500GB + 32GB SSD cache
$674 - Acer S3 - 13.3", 128GB SSD
$649 - Dell Inspiron 14z - 14", 500GB + 32GB SSD cache
$649 - Samsung NP540 - 13.3", 500GB + 24GB SSD cache
$658 - Asus S56 - 15.6", 750GB + 24GB SSD cache
In the 600-700 bracket, I would look at those laptops first, and then trickle down if they're not to your liking.
e.g: if a 13" display is far too small, the the Asus is the only stand out so far, etc.
And then next we have all sorts of little things to choose like CPU, RAM, and display size, etc etc etc. But we need to determine what you're most likely to use the laptop for first.
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And now the elephant in the room.
The elephant in this room is Haswell. Intel's next microarchitecture. The first wave of CPUs should be a couple of months away. As a rule of thumb, I never recommend to buy new stuff if something newer is around the corner. New thing comes out, and the old stuff drops in price, right. To give an analogy, I'd hate to be the guy who buys an iPhone 5 a few days before the announcement of the iPhone 6.
