one thing i would suggest is for the price consider checking out origin, they make some pretty good laptops http://www.originpc.com/eon17-x-gami...p-features.asp

and although it's not as aesthetically pleasing to look at as far as the case shape goes they do have some custom paint jobs you can add to them,

in the $3000 to $4000 range(usd) you can find better parts than alienware comes with, you can get a better i7 and either one or two gtx 580's with their "professional overclocking" a 120gb ssd and two 750gb sata drives for storage. with 16gb of memory as well.

Origin would be an option but I really don't like the look of it.

If I'm customizing a laptop for 3 grand or more then I want it to be a nice piece of eye candy as well.

just wondering, with the recent "upgraded" specs I purchased, such as the sli 580s 2gb and 2.5ghz i7 and 16gb ram, would i be able to record new games on fraps at low settings 1920x1080 with no lag?

Running it at 1280x720 on high/max settings will probably allow better results. I don't know how well FRAPS performs these days: haven't used it in a while. Perhaps it'll run fine on max everything, but the FRAPS I knew was a chugfest at high resolution regardless of the hardware at the time.

with fraps when recording put your destination folder on a secondary harddrive, i have a 320gb hdd in my computer for example which doesn't have the game or windows installed on it that i record to.

never record directly to your windows drive... unless you have an ssd in which case it probably would record better than a secondary. i don't know about that for sure though as i don't have an ssd yet.

So, what harddrive options do you guys think is the best? Would it be better to just get the 256gb SSD and buy an external harddrive of 2TB or something to store my video footage on?

I WILL be using this laptop for everything, including mass gaming, photoshop and editing for youtube videos.

if you get an ssd you should still be able to get a secondary hdd inside your laptop, that would be the best option, a 256gb ssd + 750gb sata or something. even if it was only a 160gb sata it would still be around twice as fast if not faster than an external.

Buying it from the Alienware site I can't unless I talk to customer support while ordering and maybe get them to do it.. I know on other sites you can get Alienware laptops and have it done for you, but I'm not too sure I want to tinker with a laptop this expensive.

Lol the only reason i would buy alienware is because i like the glowing keyboard

what i mean is it should be an option to have a secondary hdd aside from the ssd through the harddrive selection menu.

So, I did some research and watched some tutorials and I can actually just buy the SSD/HDD and Ram myself off of newegg or a retailer and put it in with very little effort. Will save me a lot of money and get me the setup I want.