I would wait for Haswell which is going to be released in 2 weeks. Haswell will improve battery life significantly and improve graphics performance. Make sure the i7 is a quad core when purchasing (sometimes manufacturers disable 2 cores). 8GB of RAM is becoming the norm lately. As for a dedicated graphics card, you will not find any ultrabooks with a dedicated GPU (if it has one, it is most likely weak). I recently helped someone else with the same issue and came up short. The faster the GPU gets, the less battery life you receive Keep that in mind. What games will you be playing?