Which laptop?

[bpgunning]

I'm a senior in high school and I know enough about computers to get a general idea of what I want, but I want more opinions. When I get it sometime later this year, I will have approx. $3000 to spend on it. All the respective processors have advantages. I will be using it for gaming and heavy-duty engineering programs all through college. I am leaning towards the Athlon 64 X2 but it's very expensive and hard to find in laptops. Sager is coming out with a new model with X2 this week but I haven't seen pricing yet. The only downside to the Pentium M is a slower FSB, but where that fails the Pentium 4 picks up its slack with 800 mhz. This is just my take on it, but for gaming, multitasking and some pretty hefty programs, something with Hyperthreading or Hypertransport seems more fitting. I'm looking more at custom made but possibly Alienware as well. My friends have had Dells with nothing but problems.
Hypersonic-PC has some pretty sick stuff. I made a P4 3.2 ghz with 2 gigs of DDR2-667 RAM, nVidia go 6800 gfx card, 60gb 7200 RPM HD, 17" SXGA+ for about $2700. The only X2 they have is at least $3000. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks alot.

[thefultonhow]

If I were you I would skip the desktop CPUs. The Pentium-M offers roughly equivalent performance with much lower power consumption and heat output. If you want a dual-core (and since you're looking for an Athlon 64 X2, it sounds like you do), you could wait until January or February, when laptops with the new Yonah dual-core Pentium-Ms come out.

If you only want the Go 6800, whatever Yonah laptop that replaces the Dell Inspiron 9300 would probably be your best bet.