Everyone I know that's used a "gaming" laptop had it die within a year. I would really recommend sticking to desktops for any serious gaming.
there's a few good laptops on this site http://computers.toptenreviews.com/gaming-laptops/ imo alienware is overpriced just because its a name brand. i have also heard alot of good reviews about the Voodoo Envy http://www.voodoopc.com/#/productsenvy Definitely agree with kazzier and kellexx here, you can easily upgrade specific parts as needed. If you dont need a comp right away the best deal is to buy each individual piece of your desktop seperately when its on sale. this is what i did and it save me about $500 (over the course of a year ex: core i7 $399-->$200). If you change your mind i could give u some suggestions.
Honestly. I bought a gaming laptop because I was living in a hotel for 2 months+ and needed something to do. I found a deal on an Alienware (Don't flame..) M15x on sale with a $250 rebate from a local dealer and I took the plunge. Its been a great gaming laptop so far, but I wouldn't recommend using it for anything too intensive. Its got great specs but.. still struggles with some things every now and then. Other than that, I couldn't really find anything with what I wanted from any other dealers that gave me the best bang for my buck.
Those are decent too, I was looking at those as well. I wish you could build-from-scratch your own laptop. :] I just built my desktop and got it setup when we lost our old contract and I got put on the road, so I spent a lot on computer related stuff in a short time. I kinda have buyer's regret now, but that's my own fault.
i have the dv7-1199ed (HP) laptop, its listed as an "entertainment laptop" it, however has a reasonable kick in games, i can run aion at near max settings, and also dragon age for example ran fine with near max settings (just dont use AA) im really satisfied with this laptop, specially since i have the 2 hdd's redone as a raid-0 config (just burn the factory image to 2 dvd's to be sure, and install a clean windows on the 2 disks freshly formatted and set up as raid-0) also, in my case, i replaced the intel 5100 wlan adaptor with a 5300 (supports draft N up to 480mb) rather than G turbo at crappy 60mb cost me about 40 euro to do this, and it was shit easy in my case, i also removed the stock cooling paste and applied OCZ FREEZE paste, this made a minor difference in temps, but if you dont wanna do all this, this is still a great laptop, when i bought it 2 years ago, it was allready stopped being produced at HP and it set me back 1000 euros then, right now, laptops are insanely faster.. just a few things to watch out for.. intel : do NOT go for a M class cpu, these are slow and power efficient, iow crap for gaming, go for a P class, like the laptop above, it has a P8400 core2duo @ 2.26ghz memory : do NOT go for 3gb memory if it has DDR2 memory (DDR2 can run in dual band, but it requires a equal split, having one stick of 1gb and one stick of 2gb is not gonna work) so make sure theres 2x2 in there, if its DDR3, it depends on the chipset, but basically its safe to assume you will be fine with 3 or 6 gb since it can use triple band videocard : do not go for things like Nvidia 9200 GO! , these are pure crap, at the very least, go for a M if nvidia, however i would prefer an ati if i didnt have a nice deal on my current one (got a nice discount on it ) very nice actual gaming laptops would be Asus G72GX-TY029V MSI GX740-063 HP Pavilion dv8-1200ed (this one is a killer laptop)
I had my gaming laptop for about 4 years before it fried, sometimes you just need to move around a lot and laptops are better for that :X
yeah that works, but it was over the price class stated in the initial post, thats why i posted the slightly slower one, wich is like 300 dollar cheaper but yeah, this one is pro
Well, it was for a friend, and being the fuck stick that he is, he changed his mind to "less than $2000 after taxes and warranty", after which, I told him to stick his balls in a meat-grinder.
Its true lime, I was debating the same thing actually. I wanted the whole, easy lan party approach, and the whole, if im feeling lazy, bring the laptop to bed and watch a movie. While nice a laptop is for that, gaming laptops life expectancy is very short compared to that of a gaming desktop rig. I ended up buying a desktop, but if you are looking to spend $1,400 you could easily buy a nice top of the line desktop and a shitty laptop.
Like I said, it is for a friend. I've explained it to him, but he "doesn't have the room" for a desktop.
I have a laptop myself, which doesnt run great...Are those small desktops (cubes or small towers) with the reduced motherboard size any good for gaming??
if you still need it, you can look at clevo. they're in the business of building high-end laptop barebones + parts and selling them to distributors such as Alienware, Sager, Pro-Star, Eurocom. the main thing is that they don't sell directly to the consumer, so you have to check for a reseller. this should be of more assistance though : http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...-0-faq-reseller-info-read-before-posting.html