Gaming laptop and sleek / thin are mutually exclusive
Gaming laptop and 5 hour battery life are mutually exclusive
One thing Id advise is to avoid 5400 rpm Hard Drives commmonly found in the Lenovos and Samsungs, SSD / HD combos are best balance but hybrid SSD / HD like the 750 GB Momentus XT give ya 95% of the performance with none of the "what do i put where" hassle.
I'd also advise .... "Know who really made your laptop" The vast majority of laptops on the market (94% in 2011) are manufactured by a small handful of Taiwan-based Original Design Manufacturers (ODM), although their production bases are located mostly in mainland China. Major relationships include:
Quanta sells to (among others) HP, Lenovo, Apple, Acer, Toshiba, Dell, Sony, Fujitsu and NEC
Compal sells to (among others) Acer, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo and HP/Compaq
Wistron (former manufacturing & design division of Acer) sells to Dell, Acer, Lenovo and HP
Inventec sells to Toshiba, HP and Lenovo
Pegatron sells to Asus, Toshiba, Apple, Dell and Acer
Foxconn sells to Asus, Dell, HP and Apple
Flextronics (former Arima Computer Corporation notebook division) sells to HP
Clevo sells direct to local distributors such as Sager, FalconNW, VoodooPC, WindowPC and other boutique gaming houses.
For $3k, ya might wanna look at a Clevo P370EM3 custom built job
http
/www.lpc-digital.com/sager-np9370-3d.html
117.3" Full HD 3D LED 120Hz 72% NTSC Color Gamut Matte with Emitter and 1 pair NVIDIA 3D Vision™ Glasses
Dual NVIDIA GeForce™ GTX 680M's total 8GB GDDR5 in SLI
Intel Core i7-3630QM Processor
Microsoft Windows® 7 Professional 32/64-Bit Edition
16GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 2 X 8GB
750GB Seagate Momentus XT ST750LX003 7200RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 8GB SSD
6X Blu-ray Reader/8X DVD±R/2.4X +DL Super-Multi Drive
Killer Wireless-N 1202 with Bluetooth 4.0 (Dual Band)
Removable Smart Lithium-Ion battery pack (8 cell) 89.21WH
Integrated Fingerprint Reader
Free Shipping
List is $2,899 but ya should be eligible for a $200-250 discount
Now that's not what I buy....Im perfectly happy with these:
http
/www.lpc-digital.com/sager-np9170-features.html
w/ GTX 675MX, Seagate Momentus 750 GB, 16GB RAM, BR reader, 17" screen 1920 x 1080 for $1325