I have a dell insperion 9300 that I use for full time gaming and it handles BF2, UT 2k4, Q4 flawlessly. My specs are.
Inspiron 9300 Intel® Pentium® M Processor 740
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz 2 Dimm
Video Card 256MB NVIDA® GeForce™ Go 6800
17" widescreen
60GB 7200rpm Hard Drive Win XP home
3D-05 below, without any overclocking
at the time, Fragetti puchaced a custom built lappy for the same price and it wasn't 1/2 as fast, he had the AMD 64 CPU, but a weaker gpu.
also, go to
http://www.deals2buy.com and you'll see Dell coupons, new ones every week (thursdays I think) I knocked my rig down from $2200, to $1400.
Some guys will say go desk top, but I go to a few lans a year, and I had a small form that I carried on and borrowed a monitor at the lan, that sucked. Now I carry on my lappy with a mouse and a Nostromo and I'm set. Not to mention snagging wifi's at the airport or watching a dvd to kill time
also, I've gamed on mine for 8 hours straight and no heat issues.