As an Alienware owner, I really recommend you consider its weight. If you don't have a car, dont buy an Alienware ! :P Other than that the laptop is amazing, but seriously consider the weight.

By the way, benchmark it the day you get it and watch its temperature, when I bought it last year, there were lots of faulty ones being shipped, I was lucky mine is still in perfect condition.
Sadly my friend alienware was a standalone company with quality laptops, then it was bought by dell and well... :(

As MMMs said i dont support gaming laptops. I hate laptops in general :P. giv me a 15" nettop and am good. You want gaming laptop get a desktop, you will pay less than 1/2 the price for better specs or same price for specs miles ahead. And the most important thing is that YOU control the pc not the other way.
Ok...he's getting an alienware laptop...these things are awesome! Great performance, looks, build quality...expensive yet you get what you pay for...I advise you to SLI 580m in your laptop (you can run hefty games much better and it will allow you to go 3D later on since 3D requires double the processing power)...good luck building a desktop too...mabrook!

Although I do prefer desktops, for various reasons, he likes having a laptop. Fine! Congrats! Just consider weight and you're good to go.
I dont think 3D is an option unless he can get a 120 refresh rate screen
Get an SSD. Never go with normal HDDs.

As for the price, you might be mistaken my friend.
The Intel® Core™ i7 2920XM Overclocked Turbo Boost to 4.0GHz (8MB Cache) costs an additional $625.00 from the default one. Not to mention the 32GB rams, the graphic card and the rest of the features.
for the price of a ssd? I think it would be an overkill
babum wroteI dont think 3D is an option unless he can get a 120 refresh rate screen
Of course. If he gets a 3DTV or a 3D monitor then he's already all good to go.
Get an SSD. Never go with normal HDDs.
Is that a rule? What about storage? Where is he going to store games, media, etc...? I think if he wants to go for an SSD, he should plump for an SSD for boot and games that benefit (Crysis 2 and World of Warcraft) and an HDD for general storage.

@lorcan32: The 6990M is faster than the 580M and, if I'm not mistaken, is cheaper. Why don't you check reviews for the 6990M xfire performance and report back? Do you prefer Nvidia or AMD? Don't forget that AMD's drivers are getting better and Nvidia's drivers are becoming much crappier (I have an Nvidia card).
babum wrotefor the price of a ssd? I think it would be an overkill
Yea right, -_- and 32 GB of RAMs ain't a total waste of money ?
i.e: What can you do with 32GB of memory and you can't do with 16. OR 8!

And SSDs are definitely better. For storage, get a 140$ 1TB Seagate Expansion external HDD.
Save on RAMs, Invest in SSDs.

If you didn't, it'd be like buying a Bugatti, with a mini cooper's transmission system :) (Not engine, since it would be the CPU :P)
@ yasamoka, i have always preferred nvidea but you seem to know more about this than i do so i will go with your opinion. But remember moores law , i want this thing to last me A long time , with 32gb of ram , the laptop wont get outdated for quite some time :) , this needs to be able to handle the best games and graphics for at least 4 more years as it is a big investments, i have been collecting a little above 1.5 years now. LOL ,i cant change my laptop every two years or w/e. I agree that ssd's are better and i already have a 2 tb external so normal storage wont be an issue, and if i am not mistaken dont ssd's last longer?
Beej is correct with 2500$ you can get a desktop that would be 10 years ahead of ur laptop
btw nowadays no game will use more than 8gb of ram period top tier games dont even use 4gb! 32gb is not future proof its a waste of money cause ur laptops graphic card and cpu will be useless by the time we would be using applications that need 32gb of ram anyways its your money in the end :)