help me buy a laptop

[GreenMachine]

hello everybody I have some money saved for a laptop for school. i would like this laptop to be geared towards higher end gaming and sound speakers mainly. after some searching I have settled on one that looks good.
Newegg.com - ASUS G Series G73SW-XN2 Notebook Intel Core i7 2630QM(2.00GHz) 17.3" 8GB Memory DDR3 1333 500GB HDD 7200rpm DVD Super Multi NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M
i have about $1300 to invest. is this a decent laptop pick? does it support raid? is there a better laptop for the money? thanks in advance!

(the one I ruled out as it offers less than the one above http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152239)

 

[MindoverMaster]

The ASUS G series are excellent. However, you will not play games at ultimate. Medium at best. This is because of heat issues. Any laptop has minimum space for air to flow. Also, you don't have a huge heatsink on the CPU nor GPU. Even with a notebook pad, it still can get pretty hot.

A notebook isn't a desktop. It does not have extra SATA ports. If you want to raid, get an external HDD case that can do RAID. This can not be your OS drive.