I have to agree with Gaffer and TomGuy. Without knowing what the laptop will be doing, any recommendations people might give aren’t really all that terribly useful.
These days, just about any gaming rig would be fast enough to do just about anything you could reasonably want of it. However, “gaming” also tends to bump up the video specs quite a bit, which you might not need, and would therefore be a waste of money better spent on memory or a faster disk.
Since you say you’ve ruled out a real operating system for it, (heh) you’re probably not going to be doing kernel recompiles. Honestly, these days processors are plenty fast enough for just about any normal business purposes. More ram is always better than just about anything else you can buy unless you have needs of top-end video rendering. I’ve got 18GB on my desktop, and have only really managed to completely max out the processors and ram a few times unless I was simulating a production environment in VMs.
Gaming also bumps up the weight.
Buy a $500 laptop AMD APU. It will do everything you want it to do. I bought an A6 with a dedicated video card for $500. I could play Call of Duty on it.