I'm in the military so I'm on the move constantly and my 4 year old dell laptop can't even run Counter Strike 1.6 above 10 frames. I'm pretty interested in games coming soon such as Diablo 3 and Guildwars 2 but I know next to nothing when it comes to PC's so I'm coming here for some advice. Does anyone have any input on my current shopping list? anything I need to upgrade?

You know your paying mark up just to own something with "Alien Ware" in its name right? 

Yeah, but I'm hoping my military discount balances it out.

Get a Sager, it's often the best performance for the money.

Edit: Although at a discount that high it's still a pretty good deal compared to other brands, so at that price I wouldn't recommend against it.

Your name is either dumb, self-conscious, self-consciously dumb, or self-consciously brilliant. I'm not sure which it is...

Yes that is a great price and and overall good laptop. And thank you for your service.

I'd recommend getting an SSD if you can. Even if it's only a small one to install the operating system to combined with a larger HDD for everything else.

That's a pretty good price with your discount.

Looks pretty good with that discount.

@AirForcebro: Can you change it to an i5? Better to get more ram or upgrade the gfx card (or pocket the savings for games)

@mosdl: You mean..the Alien Ware laptop model or the processor? I messed around with some different models and came out with this. Saves me $250 better deal? How big of a performance difference from the 1st one? Main thing is the Display is 3.3 inches smaller and the processor is .3ghz slower.

@Subject2Change: @Subject2Change said:

Yes that is a great price and and overall good laptop. And thank you for your service.

Oh and thanks man, Love serving my country every single day.

I like your first one better, or this one if you can swing it with your discount

1080p monitor and much better videocard.

Comparing the price of that laptop to the laptop I got last year, yup, that's certainly worth it.

@AirForcebro said:

@mosdl: You mean..the Alien Ware laptop model or the processor? I messed around with some different models and came out with this. Saves me $250 better deal? How big of a performance difference from the 1st one? Main thing is the Display is 3.3 inches smaller and the processor is .3ghz slower.

The processor. You want to keep the 660M graphics card. An Intel i7 is kinda overkill, but it looks like Alienware doesn't offer i5s.

I like your first one better, or this one if you can swing it with your discount

1080p monitor and much better videocard.

That's a hefty discount. I paid more for my laptop a couple years ago, and it wasn't as powerful.

@Wallzii said:

@Kidavenger said:

I like your first one better, or this one if you can swing it with your discount

1080p monitor and much better videocard.

This. The 7970M is a true beast of a mobile GPU, putting out desktop GTX 570 numbers. That in itself is an incredible feat, and should last you long into the future. Also you will be thankful for the bigger screen and the 1080p resolution. If I were you I would save up a little more and get something a little better that will last you longer, an investment for the future, if you will.

@AirForcebro said:

I'm in the military so I'm on the move constantly and my 4 year old dell laptop can't even run Counter Strike 1.6 above 10 frames. I'm pretty interested in games coming soon such as Diablo 3 and Guildwars 2 but I know next to nothing when it comes to PC's so I'm coming here for some advice. Does anyone have any input on my current shopping list? anything I need to upgrade?

looks perfect other then you should upgrade to 8-16 gigs of ram

I never recommend Alienware because you overpay (a lot) compared to Sager or Asus, and now that they're owned by Dell, their support is horrible.

But that's a damn good discount. Go for it, but look into the possibility of a 1080p resolution.

@sarge1445: I agree with the statement about the RAM, I didn't notice the 6GB in the build I quoted. To offset the price it could always be brought down to 1333MHz as well, in gaming there won't be any tangible difference between that and 1600MHz.

Yes... its a very good deal that

Thanks for the help everyone! I went with M14x upgraded the ram to 8gigs, changed the processor to an i7 instead of an i5, upgraded the monitor to a 1600x900 900p one, and the video card to the 2gig geforce 650m for around $780 runs amazing! even more amazing when I changed the video card settings when I realized it was using the onboard hd integrated graphics card instead of the nvidia one!