Dell's ownership of Alienware hasn't hurt the franchise. I benchmarked this against 5 other machines, all with I7's (except the mac), including Dell's own loaded Inspiron and Asus' loaded laptop. For 400 bucks less: get this! The benchmarks in all categories were NOT notably different than the I7. Of course you also can get this with an I7 but in my case that would be ego, given nearly equal performance with not only heavy gaming, but also running Unity game programming island tree sims, which can even crash the most robust towers.