Short answer, if someone said I could pick and ROG or an MSI for free, I'd pick the ASUS. Gaming laptop? Do you really really need a laptop for gaming? A desktop will blow away the laptop every time, for lots less money. I can build a desktop for gaming for the same money that has an 8 core processor, 1TB SSD. The video GPU will be 4-5x faster than ANY laptop can dream of, and the RAM will also be 4-8x faster, with a CPU that is 2-4x faster. I took the stance with my first computer that I was never going to allow someone to go out and cobble together parts on lowest bid, assemble them, stuff them in a box, mark it up 200%-$1000% then sell me a pig in a poke. Your $3000 laptop will go from a $3000 laptop to a $500 laptop so fast your head will spin. It has been 10 years since I built my desktop, and it has been sitting in a room delegating printer functions running 24-7-365 for 10 years straight. It's old, and slow by today's standards, but it still works. If someone put an ROG Asus and an MSI, and an Alienware on a table and said, "Pick one, and it's yours for free", I'd take the Asus. My desktop's mother board is an Asus, and it is 10 years old, works great, no signs of age, except that newer CPUs won't fit, it's DDR2, and it's old technology. The Ausu ROG 17" gaming laptops have great heat removal with heat sinks, and dual exhaust, with copper heat sinks, usually Japanese capacitors, and better jelly bean parts in general. The laptop I am using now was upgraded from 4 to 16GB RAM, and installed a 1TB Samsung Pro SSD, a new battery and charger. So I paid maybe $650 for a laptop that Dell would charge me $2900 for. I also have a docking station so I can run it into printers, and a 72" flat screen television. Is it a "gaming laptop" ? Not really. I can get a frame rate of 30-34 FPS which is very standard gaming frame rate for a gaming laptop. Will it overheat? Oh yeah! I wish the 6410 would take a 4 core processor. Those just won't heat up. The Asus has a really nice heat sink too. When the CPU starts getting hot the CPU will throttle back and slow itself down. All gaming laptops have beefed up heatsinks, but Asus has the best looking heat sink design in my opinion. I almost bought one just for that reason. I do real estate work that is very CPU demanding. All the links trying to load in information for 500-1000 houses at a time, with 7000 pictures, and all the descriptions, will bog down a CPU and put most cheap laptops in a slow motion stupor.