I have been trying to find a somewhat affordable (less that $1000) laptop for a user that has a separate graphics card. We buy Dell and I have not had much luck. The best options are more like $1200.

Dell just released a new laptop and it uses the AMD Radeon R7 M445. I know EW does not recommend AMD cards, but I was wondering if you had an opinion on if it would run EW okay. This is for our youth minister who uses EW weekly off his laptop for youth events who often plays videos.

I'm using an A8-6410 APU 2.0 Ghz Lenovo laptop at home with R5 graphics to build schedules. It struggles with that. It will run EW but I don't expect it to be very fast at it. It sometimes struggles browsing the web even after upgrading to 16 GB ram an SSD and faster network card, but I spent about $300 on this thing, so I don't expect too much from it. The R7 is probably better, but I don't know by how much.
You might look at this 13 inch Alienware for 899.99
http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/productd ... b/dkcwe01s

Or maybe the Inspiron 15 inch gaming series for 799.99
http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/productd ... ncwpw5715h

Both have nvidia 960m Graphics.

You might be able to use this site to lookup the card and compare performance scores between it and the nvidia 960m.
http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-graphics-ranking/

Thanks for all that. We need a 15" do the Alienware is out. I have seen the Inspiron gaming one, very much dislike that red color and you have to go up to $1299 to get it in black! I also dislike having the numeric keypad on a laptop.

Looks like we will have to make some compromises!

It's possible an intel card might perform as well as the R7 in this application, but can't promise anything of course.