All of us have our reasons for buying laptops. For some, it’s a way to socialise online after a hard day’s work, to catch up with friends spread all over the world, check out the latest news and also to book tickets. However, there is also a breed of people who want a laptop just for the sake of gaming. For them, no plain jane laptop would do. Only state-of-the-art features, combined with flashy looks and top-notch gaming hardware will cut the ice for these game geeks. Speed is of the essence and so is top-drawer graphics and high resolution. So which is the laptop that will fuel the excitement of a serious gamer — a machine that he must possess to be the king of the cyber gaming jungle?

This search for the dream machine for the serious gamer brought us to the 17-inch Alienware M17x. Most game geeks swear by the laptop, an award-winning product which boasts of the best in the business gaming hardware and is the best in its category with flashy designs. It truly is a top draw for 3D gamers.

But here’s the catch. Although the base model Alienware M17x comes for $1,800, it’s unlikely that serious gamers will fall for the stripped down version. To leverage the full power of the machine, the buyer has to cough up a lot of dough, in fact as high as $4,000. That’s the upgraded version that’s available for testing to most of the reviewers and it comes with Nvidia GeForce GTX graphics, a high-resolution display and Blu-ray drive. These add-ons can redefine one’s gaming dimensions with the in-built NVIDIA® SLI™-Ready GeForce® 8800 graphics processors.

Gaming is a simulation of reality. It takes one to places that one wants to be in real life but cannot be. With the world’s first DirectX® 10 GPU in the Alienware M17x, there is now an embedded feature of a powerful synchronised architecture that creates an unbelievable true-to-life gaming experience driving the games at record speeds and giving the gamer an adrenalin rush. This results in game maps with vivid HDR lighting effects and helps to attain a 16x full-screen anti-aliasing at the drop of the hat.

These upgrades take the laptop to a different zone altogether, with many reviewers hailing it as the “fastest gaming laptop ever tested”, only to be pulled down by the machine’s sheer weight and the equally heavy price tag. Although the Alienware M17x is technically portable but lugging the machine around can be a pain since, at 11 pounds, it weighs like a stone. And the expensive price tag may also prove to be a dead burden on the pocket but for the serious gamers, every penny shelved out is worth its weight in gold.