Hi Jason, though slightly above your budget something like this would be good: http://www.amazon.com/MSI-GP70-Leopard-490-17-3-Inch-Gaming/dp/B00TI6TAH...

But generic advice:

15.6 inches minimum, 17 inch more preferable
i5 or i7 minimum 3Ghz
nvidia gpu something 40 or better e.g 740, 840, or 940, just make sure it has at least 2gb of vram
6 or 8gb of ram would do but of course 12 or 16 wouldn't go to waste.
for storage ssd or 7200rpm hdd 500GB or larger.

Hope that helps

Ben

The key to having detail in a 1080p images is recording in a codec that doesn't lose all your detail such as prores. Whereas H.264 loses more detail do to the compression.

Resolution isn't the key to an image looking good on the big screen is cinematography, lighting and colour grading.

Ben

Hi
I highly recommend the black magic pocket, you can record prores 422 and raw in camera without the atoms recorder. The bmpcc will outperform any sub $1000 DSLR.
As far as lenses go, a fast micro four thirds will do, I stick to samyang prime lenses, so I don't have a great deal of experience with zooms.

Ben

We have been using a Flycam 5000 for a while and we are very impressed by it. It defiantly competes with the more pricy steadicams. We got it from Ebay for £125 but you might be able to find it cheaper elsewhere.

You may also want to consider the flycam 3000 or the flycam nano as they are rated for lighter cameras (DSLRs), we got the 5000 as we intend to get an URSA mini soon.

Ben and Angus

My current hackintosh build:
Xeon E3 1230 v2 (basically an i7)
GTX 760
24GB Ram
1TB HDD system drive
3x 80GB HDDs in raid 0 as a scratch drive
500w PSU
Gigabyte z77 ds3h

I highly recommend it, it will rival the 5K iMac and the entry level Mac Pro for less than £1000. Any hackintosh questions just ask :)

Ben

I also have a hackintosh. Its actually the most stable computer I have used, previously I used an iMac for editing/vfx and there were way more bugs and crashes than with my current computer. Hackintoshes may have a reputation of being unstable but if you pick the right parts it will outlive any mac (based on the fact that you can very easily replace any component that fails).

Ben