$700 is a decent amount for a decent system, however, be very careful when purchasing it. Often enough, most stores will hide certain technical specs from you in order to make a system seem like an amazing setup for the price...but little do you know that the specs they show you actually mean nothing on their own, and the ones they are hiding are the reasons behind your system getting bogged down.
Take for example my crappy laptop I bought last year. 3GB of RAM, 300GB HDD, AMD Dual-Core Processor, AMD "high performance" Graphics Card. Now I know these specs aren't great in themselves, but imagine if they were higher for the sake of the argument, seeing how I got the laptop for only $300.
Now, getting that deal, you look at the CPU. Oh, dual-core! It must be fast, right? Nope. Turns out the speed and very low cache on this thing make it a pile of turds waiting to be thrown into a fire.
Now what about that RAM? 3GB is alright still these days, even on a bad system. It must be fast then, right? Wrong. The amount of RAM has nothing to do with the computer's speed at all. The amount just controls the storage of it. Yes, more RAM is better than less because more storage allows your computer to store more for processing next, however the speed limits are all down to your CPU and HDD. My RAM happened to also be a very slow kind, so the amount in terms of speed was useless to me.
Oh, 300GB HDD! Plenty of storage room! But is it fast enough not slow down my computer? This one can go both ways. Most of the time, they won't tell you the speeds of the hard drive. The rare exception to this rule is sometimes they will for laptops in the better stores that care more about customers than cash. Slow hard drives can still slow down your system, and as a result, your computer may get stuck waiting on reading/writing things to and from the HDD.
As for the graphics card, brand means everything, right? Wrong. Most graphics cards these days go without saying that brand, just like with anything else, doesn't really make a difference in the performance. Really the only exception to this is the dreaded "Intel Integrated Graphics", or any other "integrated graphics" for that matter. The reason you should avoid this is because 99% of the time they just use the CPU for processing the video straight on the motherboard. The odd exception to this is they may add a "GPU", or "Graphics Processing Unit", to the motherboard. Some players may still see good performance out of these designs, but overall they are a bad idea because they lead to heat issues, cross-processing in the CPU which takes up it's power, and overall other complications that could be easily avoided with just getting a decent graphics card which can be upgraded over time.
Overall, your own personal research and gained knowledge is your best bet at getting a decent system for the amount you wish to spend. It is possible to get a nice one at that price, depending on where you live and shop...however it will be a bit difficult as the very high end systems usually cost a few hundred or more than the amount you have saved, (assuming those are U.S. Dollars).
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