Dell machines are not generic by the way. Not that there's anything wrong with purchasing generic systems - if you do - then you can buy more generic RAM, as opposed to paying through the nose for Dell specific parts.

And gaming systems will not necessarily give you the overall top performance. They'll give you faster graphics rendering, but you might need to do number crunching instead, or SMP or a host of other things high performance tasks that gaming machines don't do.

In so far as laptops are concerned, I'd buy either Acer or Toshiba.
We shift an awful lot of these laptops every day.
If you e-mail [email protected] I can give you pricing on Monday morning. They're very competitively priced these days.