crapy clawn forums

Hey guys, need your advice (mainly Heretic's advice).

Since Im not planning to haul my desktop with me to China I need to invest in a solid laptop that can fill in as my home PC / Gaming machine. I don't need it to be particularly portable or high on battery life since I'll also have my work laptop and my Surface.

I've been looking around at various "gaming laptop" offers and I want to know what you guys think before I make a purchase.

Primary vendors
iBuyPower: These guys appear to offer the best deals but I've never heard of them and therefore I question their build quality and trustworthyness. [H] has an article about them from 2006 where the reviewer complains about terrible support. Overall, [H] gave the experience a 2/10.
AlienWare: It's Dell so I'm more confident about build quality and support. They're all medium price range. Downside, I would feel like a big gay nerd if I owned an "Alienware" machine.
Razor: They're overpriced and the company seems very douchy. Is there any advantage if I buy from them?

Machines I'm looking at:

1. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... CatId=4001
Decent processor
Good ram
Good video card
Over 1 TB in storage

2. http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-M17x-r4/pd.aspx
If you customize it to have specs that match the iBuyPower machine then it becomes more expensive



So..... what else is there?

I'm out of the loop on newer laptop specifics, but I'd take a look at Sager and Asus as well. You're almost certainly going to get the best build quality and features from the Alienware, but you'll pay for the privilege. You probably have employee discounts available to you that'll make the Alienware a little less expensive (if not, I have a 17% off coupon from work that should work for you) and there's also Black Friday.

In general, you'll want an SSD + external backup and 4-8GB RAM. At 1080p, you'll probably want a 560m/6870m GPU as a bare minimum; a 670m/7970m or higher should last you a long while. You can pick up an SSD and RAM for relatively cheap these days, so I wouldn't be concerned with what comes in the base system.

All that said, unless you seriously plan on gaming away from your desk, I'd just build a SFF system using most of your current parts and call it a day. Pack the components in their boxes in your checked luggage and buy one of the Korean IPS monitors once you're over there.