I guess you're talking about the R3. I personally wouldn't be purchasing either with the M18x (GTX 485 SLI, Radeon 6970 Crossfire) just around the corner.

If you really want the R3, might still want to hold off to see if Dell bring out the GTX 485 as an option for the 3D panel. Guys on notebookreview forum already have another company's GTX 485 working in an R3, but not with 3D. The GTX 460 is just not a good option for a 3D gaming laptop, too underpowered.

However if you don't want 3D, you can always go with the single Radeon 6970, very decent card.

The 460M isn't a bad card from what I read...

I have a feeling the 460M can game just fine....1.5GB memory is a lot, and if you don't game in 3D at high settings, im sure its great.

I like the idea of watching movies in 3D, playing some games, it just seems like its the newest tech. 

Regarding M18x launch date - sorry - it has not been launched yet - it must be soon though...

If you compare the FPS benchmarks between GTX460M and the HD 6970M, you will see that the AMD card is in a completely different class.  The 460 will play all current games on medium settings (obviously your CPU would play a part too), but if you want to play your games on ultra settings and at high screen resolutions, the 6970M is a much better investment.  If 3D is so important to you though, I would follow the advice of the previous post and wait for the GTX485M-powered M18x.  Then you can have your 3D and the most powrful mobile GPU available at the moment.  I beieve the M18x is being launched today (19/04/11).

To be fair with the 460m.  The current drivers that Dell has released on their site are not optimized for the 460m yet, at least that is my assessment of the release notes.  I'm still waiting for nVidia to support this card as their official drivers don't support hybrid power yet.

I'm not saying that the 460M with optimized drivers will beat the 6970M, but it should close the gap a bit.

But really, I'd wait for the M18X as it will definitely be a more powerful system.

the 6970m should be a good card according to benchmark tesing but UNFORNTUNATELY THE DELL ALIENWARE drivers for this card still need to be updated. The current drivers that are available from Dell (ati amd hasn't posted any driver updates) caused my brand new out of the box 3 days ago laptop to crash about 10 times already. I have to manually switch from the 6970m to the integrated low power gpu to avoid the random crashing. I have to test the 6970m driver stability with extended gameplay to see how that is.

That does not make sense.  Why would AMD not have any working drivers available?  I can understand if the drivers are not optimal yet, but surely, they must have a release that does not compromise system stability.

I will be receiving my new 6970M R3 tomorrow.  I hope what you said doesn't apply to all 6970 R3s.

AMD has the 11.5 mobility drivers out, and though a few on notebookreview's M17x forum have had issues installing them, most are saying they're pretty good.

As long as you do the old tried and true method of installing AMD/ATi drivers you should be fine.

1. Uninstall current drivers.

2. Reboot into safe mode.

3. Run CCleaner/Driver Sweeper to clean-up old drivers.

4. Reboot.

5. Install new drivers.

etc...

EDIT: Actually, some are saying that the 11.5 install over the top of the stock Dell drivers just fine.