Gaming laptop from Dell: Dell Inspiron XPS (not AMD-powered :)) Not available in Belgium, as far as I know.

Desktop replacers from Promedion. Not a very known brand but they have laptops that are fast as hell (AMD64, P4 (FSB800), ...)!! Very good 3D performance at a reasonable price! You can configure many options, have a look. And the best part is: it's a Dutch company and they deliver also in Belgium :)

Plus docking station provision would be a nice feature.:D

Those laptops from Promedion aren't completely customable. Dell for example offers also upgrades for their laptops. The Dell Inspirion XPS and 9100 (same laptop??) for example have a Mobility Radeon 9700 128 Mb but you can choose to upgrade it to a Mobility Radeon 9800 256 Mb.

The top models of Promedion have a Mobility Radeon 9700 256 Mb and you cannot change this. But that and the soundcard are about the only things you cannot choose :D Btw, Dell offers upgrades like "P4 3,20 GHz to P4 3,40 GHz" and "80 Gb HD to 100 Gb HD". Promedion is just crazy :D They have an AMD laptop with choise between 8 CPU's. And check out their top-model, the D870P (P4); have you ever seen a laptop with RAID-config?? :o :ws:

And I don't think the 9700 of the Promedion is a problem. I've read reviews on ZDNet of a Promedion 500 DP (Mobility Radeon 9600) and a Dell Inspirion XPS (Mobility Radeon 9600). Conclusion? Although the 500DP has a 9600 on board, the XPS was beaten with more then 400 points in 3DMark03.

If I needed a portable right now, I wouldn't doubt :D

I don't want a barebone PC because then I'm still stuck with the TFT screen and seperate adapter etc etc. I damaged my brandnew 17" TFT by taking it to a LAN and now have a dead pixel at the center of the screen.. that sucks.

"How important is weight / battery life / noise / heat? Not at all, or a little?"
weight&battery life are not important, will be used hooked up 99% of the time.

noise is important, so P4 prescott is no option. Promedion's 17" AMD 64 laptop fits my needs perfectly, thank you for that link. for €2100 I have

A64 3000+
1gb RAM
80gb 5400rpm
R9700Pro
DVDwriter
2 year warranty cash & carry
8 days pixel warranty

now that kicks ***! :)

@ Duron: "However, I would not use 'must be able to play doom3' as a criteria, because once the SP campain is finished, most of the fun is gone. According to many people, DOOM3 MP sucks butt."

I already finished Doom3 but I don't care about SP. Doom 3 engine WILL be used in a lot upcoming games, so my portable desktop MUST be able to run that engine flawlessy at medium/high detail.

thank you all for the comments, I will start selling of my gear in the next couple of months to pay for my new lappy :)

I'd buy the same promedion if I were you. The widescreen TFT might not be ideal for getting some serious work done, but it kicks *** for DVD / games. :)

imo, if you wait a little bit, the r9800m will be available to all pc vendors (like promedion), and it's far better than the fake called 9700m, because it's just a renamed & edited 9600 chip

& also, loose the hd, buy the cheapest drive from promedion & upgrade it yourself with a brand new (hitachi) 7200rpm for notebooks (@100gig soon)

I need to get rid of my current systems, this will take 2-4 months, so there's still time :)

True, true.
But for now, the DOOM3 engine doesn't look that good for the resources it's using, maybe it will get better over time. Maybe the HL2 engine will do better.
Anyway, that's all offtopic. You need something speedy and promedion looks like it can give it.

Just make sure you don't cut back on the HDD, 4200rpm is terrible. If you launch 2 simple read or write threads on the disk, your whole windows hogs like hell (writing a DVD at 2x and converting another with DVD2one and you can go get that coffee you wanted)
In games it's even worse, you'll get an extra lag penalty and when entering a new room, you'll freeze for several seconds.

any more details on that HDD thing? where can I get those hitachi and are they more expensive then gold?

Battery life? Maybe 1,5 hours if you're lucky :)
You're still going to use a seperate mouse and keyboard for gaming, I hope? :)

So that's why the Promedia with r9600m had better 3D-scores then the Dell with r9700m? Those chips are almost identical? :grum: