Some reviews of the Vaio AR series?

I am planning to get a medium to high end laptop soon. I will be playing games like warcraft 3, counter-strike source, and Guild Wars. I know these games are not very graphic intensive but I want my notebook to be WELL SUITED for the next gen games coming. I want a computer that does not go over 3500 dollars. I would perfer if it stayed at 3000-3100. Also, i don't want a laptop that gets very hot. it should be able to stay cool.

Then I saw the Vaio Ar series. Are they any good? Other then the one review I saw on these forums with the bigs pictures, I can't seem to find many others. Also, is this laptop really big? because it really turns me off. I want to have a laptop that I can put on my bed at night. Also, are they loud when playing games or even just surfing the web?

Can you guys give me some reviews or link me to places where they have reviews of this laptop?

The other laptops that I am looking into are these

Alienware- Area 51 m5550
Alienware Area 51 m750
Dell XPS m1710

 

Somebody posted a review in this thread a couple of weeks ago.

 

As far as wanting a notebook to be "well suited" for the next generation of games yet to be released...I don't know if the AR is quite what you're looking for. It is capable of playing most newer games at medium to high settings though, and the 7600GT, especially, is no slouch.

Cooling: I've encountered notebooks with better cooling than the AR. It can get very warm, and occasionally downright hot when doing anything CPU/GPU intensive. It can even get warm at idle. I think the main problem is that the fan doesn't run nearly as much, or at as high of a speed as it needs to. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to control the fans in Sony notebooks, or at least the AR series, manually. The upside is that the notebook is virtually silent, but me personally, I'd rather take the fan noise anyday for a cooler notebook without having to use a cooling pad.

Size: The AR is probably one of the biggest 17" notebooks around. If size is an issue, the AR is probably not what you want. You really need to go to a store that carries it and see it in person.

Overall though, I love my AR. It has it's faults, but I can overlook them most of the time because there are a lot of great things about it too. Every notebook has drawbacks of some sort, depending on who you ask.

I would really recommend to you the Dell XPS M1710. I've owned that system as well and it seems to fit all of your requirements. It does run very cool if you manually control the fans with i8kFanGui, however it won't be totally silent. Size wise it's big, but considering it's screen size, it's below average size for the class. For gaming, if you get the 7900GTX, you're set for awhile for sure.

You'll be hard pressed to find reviews for the AR series. The ones here are excellent, but most commercial reviews that you'll find will focus on the AR190's Blu-Ray feature only, neglecting just about every other aspect of a very fine machine.