Quote Originally Posted by AgentPaper View Post
While it may once have been better and cheaper to build your own desktop, these days you'll probably get a better deal and a better computer if you simply spend your time reasearching and hunting down a goos deal on a laptop (back to school deals are great for this).
For many applications, that may well be true (although I'd like to see a citation, myself). There's one application for which it most definitely is *not* true, though, and that's *games* (which is kind of important here, considering that's what the OP is building his machine for). The graphics hardware in a laptop will not and *can* not match a desktop graphics card--how could it, when the desktop graphics card might pull 250W at full load and the power budget for the entire laptop is half that?