Looking for a new gaming laptop

[Sebazy]

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Whilst there's some good nuggets in there and I agree that Clevo rebrands are always a great budget option to look out for, there's a few things I feel the need to correct given your track record of hyperbole.

First up, the whole Dell/Alienware proprietary parts/junk thing. The last significant proprietary and closed off standard I'm aware of on an Alienware was the Graphics Amplifier connecter, and frankly, given that the enclosure for it was less than half the price of a TB3 unit and it avoided the nasty overheads those enclosures suffered, I'm going to say that it was actually a highlight of the laptops that offered it. The last major faux pas that Dell/Alienware made that I can think of would be the lighting controller on Core 2 era laptops that could easily be bricked by installing an external keyboard driver that Dell still lists on the page for those machines to this day.

Beyond those two fairly significant cases, I'm struggling to think of any significant parts in the laptop that are proprietary in a manner that you wouldn't also see in a similar tier Asus, Gigabyte, MSI or such. The chassis, motherboard and cooling system are all going to be fairly unique to a particular model regardless of the brand. Displays are often surprisingly standardised especially in the 17" space where there's actually very few options for manufacturers to chose from. The whole is it soldered or socketed thing is just a roulette for GPU/CPU/Ram with odds that get worse as you go thinner (Do your homework here) and again, that most certainly isn't a Dell specific thing. Supporting components have long been standardised with HDDs, SSDs and Wifi cards rarely being any issue at all to replace (Lenovo arguably being the worst offenders here with their Centrino whitelisting).

Clevo are the exception rather than the norm here due to their functionality over form approach of keeping the same chassis across considerably more hardware iterations thus making it easier to source parts such as keyboards, hinges and even entire screen assemblies from a much greater pool of used parts down the line. They did have a habit of under speccing the cooling system past mid range offerings, but the more recent Clevos I've seen have gotten ontop of this.

This leads neatly onto the MSI's unreliability comment.

In short, I've simply not seen this.

From my experience (My work has me handling a significant variety of PC hardware), outside of a number of special cases such as the nForce saga years back, a powerful laptop's reliability directly correlates to the cooling system's ability to handle the heat vs the amount of neglect and misuse the machine has endured over the years.

Any brand of laptop can be equally reliable if you look after it, whereas any brand of laptop can be equally unreliable if you sit there playing it for hours at a time on your bed with the laptop sat on a pillow. Singling out individual brands when they all pull from the same limited pool of components is just daft.

TLDR: Don't base your purchasing decision on the brand. Rather, focus on features, value, cooling and bulk. And for the love of god, if you want it to last, look after it.