re: Gaming laptops

Jesus, I just can't imagine dropping $3k on something that will perform at a fraction of the desktop equivalent budget and be practically impossible to upgrade effectively.

But, I suppose if my income allowed for it, I'd be buying toys like that all the time.

At that price point, there may be some specialty smaller shops that do custom laptops with their own branding, but I'd have no clue on their quality. You can for sure get some ASUS and MSI laptops customized up to that $3k mark, but it'll mostly involve upgrades to the CPU, some mSata SSDs tacked on, excessive RAM, etc. Nothing that will go beyond a single 880M most likely.