thanks for taking the time to comment Stig. yes like I said, render time is not critical although, it should also not be painfully slow. Since what constitutes "Painfully slow" is very subjective thing, I would say it should not be more than twice as slow as a low end non workstation GPU like an HD 6670.
The reason for this query is that my room mate's moving to Europe for a six month internship in an automotive design firm and needs to buy a cheap laptop for his personal day to day use which can also run some photoshop and render tools. Stuff here in India is costlier than USA in general but I have no Idea about how it compares to Europe. Do you think that it would be better and more cost effective if he bought a laptop in Germany (that is where he's going). For an idea the below configuration is around 440 Euros:
Samsung NP300E5V-S02IN 15.6inch Laptop
Core i3 gen 3
4GB
750GB
1GB Graphic Card HD 8570M
DOS
Thanks again
-Satyam