[Cosmonautical]

You should be able to game on that no problem, if that's all you're asking. To make a comparison, I'd need other specs. Considering the price, you could look around to see if you can get similar features from another manufacturer, but that sounds about right for that hardware.

In recent years, the video industry has been making lateral shifts in technology, which doesn't make newer games unplayable on older cards, but prevents older cards from running all of the effects the games are promoted as having - whether or not those cards can work faster than their peers that were released in the same generation. So getting a faster card will get you better performance now, but it won't make you "future-safe". If the stats are similar on the Alienware and it's significantly cheaper, or has more impressive features (some more RAM would be nice for a $2000+ PC), you probably won't take a huge performance hit if you go with the GTX 260.

After looking at what you said in the first instance, though, the Alienware doesn't sound much better with the Core Quad and the same amount of RAM. With the older processor model, you could end up using your battery life to sustain a more power-hungry processor architecture and getting no more oomph for it, while the i7 will likely get better performance for less power consumption. That would explain the difference between the video cards - the Cyberpower laptop, with lesser power requirements in the area of the processor, could have more resources available to power the heftier requirements of the 280 as opposed to the 260.

If you can change out any elements, I'd suggest investigating what kind of hard-disk drives are available as alternatives. Try and find out the model of the the hard disk (just stats won't help) and I'll search up comparison benchmarks for you.



If anyone else wants to help this guy out, or I'm missing something, feel free to be my guest and say something.