You've got quietly elegant laptops designed to appeal to creative professionals; no-nonsense models designed for business types; netbooks designed for compactness. But one laptop market segment where designers can afford to get a little wild is in gaming laptops.

This latter segment is aimed at (mostly) males in their teens through 30s who use the machines not for spreadsheets or e-mail, but purely to vanquish Nazis, aliens or their social lives. Dell's new 17-inch Alienware M17x is a prime example of this beefy, tech-geek aesthetic, with an off-kilter trackpad centered on the QWERTY portion of the keyboard and an integrated number pad to assign control groups to your roving bands of orcs and what have you. Red backlighting and sharp angles contribute to the "Ooh" factor when you pull it out at the gaming convention.

Check out more shots of it at Dell's official Flickr page.