Yeah, if you want a laptop that can play new games at decent setting you should expect to pay for it, and companies like Dell and Alienware are no worse than most ...

In 5 years I expect this to change though because (with the majority of new computers sold being laptops) I suspect that publishers are going to want most games to run on a 2 year old $500 Laptop.

I like a powerful computer as much as the next person but PC is not suitable for gaming, at least not as much as a console is. Yes, you have matched close to a PS3's price tag with a heft amount of good stuff for your computer. Buy can it play PS3 games? NO, it cant. Can my PS3 play computer games? Yes. Can your PC, play bluray? No. Can my PS3 play bluray,dvd,cd (actually even hddvd with small modifications)? Yes. Does your computer also come with 4 usb ports, sd card readers, ipod dock port, etc? I doubt it. Maybe the usb ports part. Not to mention there was assembly required for your PC so that brings down it's worth just a tad.

Dont get me wrong your PC sounds awsome, very efficient from the specs. It just simply does not stand up to a console. Have fun with that though :)

I'm sorry.... you're post doesn't make much sense. The PC is suitable for not only gaming, but for many other things as well.

-Can it play PS3 games? No (though I suppose you'd probably be able to run emulators in the future). Can the PS3 can't play PC games? No, as you can't throw in the PC version of Call of Duty 4 and expect it to work (even with Linux, don't expect to play more modern games on it). What the PS3 and PC can do is play the games developed for them.

-Blu-Ray - If you're so inclined, buy a $150 Blu-ray disk drive on the current build and you're set. Heck, with the video card that can output through HDMI (like the one listed in the first post of the thread), you can hook up to an HDTV in no time.

-USB and media - My motherboard has like 8 USB ports in the back, my case has 2 front USB ports, a media card reader with one USB port, and two firewire ports

How does assembly factor into this? The whole point is that not only can you get PC parts cheaply, but you can buy your parts and assemble them yourself and not pay anywhere near $5,000 for a gaming PC (which people who hate PC gaming seem to believe is the only way to play games).

A rather poor argument especially since you seem to claim that you understand the specs of the computer listed in this thread, but then tripped and fell throughout the rest of your post.

 ok if the pc is not made for gaming then explain why WOW has roughly 16 -20 million players nline everyday. not to mention another 15-20 million playing any version of counterstrike daily. pc gamers are more and more each year. i was a console gamer for the longest time till i was introduced to counterstrike. now i prefer to upgrade my pc once ever 6 years to the highest possible specs i can for the lowest price possible and then it is good for at least 6-8 years afterwards cause not till about 3-4 years into the life of that pc the gaming market reaches those specs and after a few years after that a simple upgrade will be sufficiant. this pc i a m on right now is about 6 years old and can play WOW at medium settings without any trouble but the graphics  card that i have in it is actually almost ten years old and i can almost max out the graphics on wow. but if i do max out the graphics it has a bit of a slowdown but still looks as good or better then anything on the ps3. as for counterstrike, that game owns any game on the ps3 and then sum. well same goes for WOW as well. but then again if you combine the amount of players of both games you can see that it would take  3 times the fanbase of the ps3 to even come close to those that play those games.

i hate fanboys that are blind to other consoles or pc's tht play games. oh and btw @ whoever said that owning a gaming pc prefers a ps3 is    completely wrong. pc gamers prefer the wii. at least 90% of pc gamers do cause it is a different experience then the others.

I only own one console of this generation, the PS3.

If you want an Alienware PC, buy an Alienware case and build the PC. You'll save like 50% and still get the same performance AND image. :p

Are the Alienware cases that great in terms of features and performance vs price? I did a quick google search and saw that you'd have to go to a place like Ebay to get Alienware cases and these things are pretty expensive.

Wow.  Link?

@rorevercloud3000
PCs cant play PS3 games, is that your best argument?
And since when a PS3 can play Counter Strike, Civilization 4, Dawn of War, Starcraft, WoW etc etc.?
Blu-ray? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106227
A blu ray drive for 120$, and there are many others for around 150$
In my personal experience i never needed card readers, ipod dock ports etc.
But you can buy one of those usb sd card readers for less than 10$
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820401012

So next time you feel like praising PS3 in the PC section of the site, dont forget that PC gamers capable of building their own PCs have enough knowledge to counter all of your fanboyish ignorance.

Well, I did some looking and I hope there is somewhere else that you can play CounterStrike other than Steam's servers, otherwise there is no ****ing way that 15 million people are playing daily.

Out of 19729 servers, only half of them have over 4 people playing in a game.  Plus, this list includes other games as well.  With a maximum capacity of 631328(with an average of 32 player servers) the servers would have to completely change populations 23.759 times per day(almost once per hour).  But, I filtered the servers to only include ones that have players in them so the total number of servers is probably a lot more, but that means that the percentage of servers with over 4 people in them is a lot less.  In all I was very disappointed in the stats that I gathered from this, in regards to the number of people using Steam's servers.  My latency with all of these servers was rubbish as well.

EDIT: I took off the filter and there were a total of 20142 servers.  I will attempt to guess as to how many people are on Steam as of now.  With 19729 servers with people in them, only half of the servers have 4 or more players, so I will assume that there are an average of 10 people per server, although that is being generous.  That means there are 197290 players on Steam as of right now.  That is quite underwhelming to me.  Any thoughts on my methods?  Also, I am assuming that there are in game methods of joining servers, so would there be different servers in game than on Steam??