Treating ourselves to some real gamer-only pleasure, we’re taking a look at the Alienware Area-51 m15x gaming laptop, a rig cooked up from a brand that’s been at the top of the performance list for years, and is only getting better at their art.

This bad-boy notebook computer is fully optimized for Windows Vista 64 bit (and the forthcoming Windows 7) and offers up cutting-edge graphics, sound, connectivity, and usability features. As always, the laptop is fully configurable to offer a range of power from merely world-class to truly, unfathomably butt-kicking.

We’ll list here a range of its available innards: the Alienware Area-51 m15x gaming laptop offers several Intel Core 2 Processors, up to an Intel Core 2 Extreme running at 2.8 GHz with 6 MB of cache. Memory options range from 1 GB up to 8 GB of dual channel DDR2 RAM.

Hard drives are available from 120 GB to 500 GB, and a Smart Bay can hold an additional hard drive. The video card starts as an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256 MB of RAM, and can be bumped up all the way to an NVIDIA Quadro FX.

Several optical drive configurations are available, including 2X Dual Layer Blu-Ray. You’ll be able to get the most basic configuration starting at $1,299 – look for it online.