Slusho

I guess this is the same as the argument for attraction to large people. But I like my computers like I like my women: slim. As for the airflow issue, I don't see how the Blade could possibly get hotter than the m14x, as it pretty much gets up to the upper limit before things start melting.

I guess it really depends on what you find important then. For someone that doesn't use the ethernet and optical drive, $300 for a much thinner and lighter system doesn't seem terrible, and I wonder why Alienware is unable to get their systems down in size. Of course if those features are very important to you, the Blade wouldn't be very good. As for the MSI, I just heard about the line up of gaming laptops and they seem good, though I don't know anyone that has one of their laptops and have no personal experience with them. Another thing I just remembered is that you can get a USB adapter to add ethernet like Apple provides, and if you get a USB 3.0 one it can be gigabit ethernet. Also, gigabit wifi should soon be widely available. I've never had latency problems in multiplayer games and wifi adapters are usually faster than ISP speeds, unless you have Google Fiber.

My battery doesn't last very long on my r1 even with no discrete GPU activity. I contacted Alienware tech support and they want $140 to send me a new one (the extended warranty covers everything but the battery, fyi). Anyone know where to get a replacement battery (hopefully the exact same battery, not an inferior knock-off)?

I disagree, at least on paper. You can choose between an Alienware 14 @ $1500 (with the display and GPU upgrades) and a Razer Blade @ $1800, the main differences being that the Alienware has a higher res screen while the Razer lacks an optical bay, wired ethernet, and ability to have a second hard drive, while being thinner and lighter. I have never used my ethernet port, rarely use the optical drive, and just bought a 500GB SSD so I don't need two hard drives, so really it comes down to one being much thinner and lighter while the other has a higher res screen. I really like high res displays, but the Alienware 14 is even larger than the m14x and the Blade is much thinner and lighter than both. If we're talking about the m14x though, it of course has inferior specs in CPU and GPU. I don't, however, know how good the Razer Blade is in terms of dependability and durability, driver updates, and real world problems.