the alienwares are a subsidary of dell, yes they are more aimed at gaming but that is mainly due to they have beast graphics cards and processors. As due to the build quality, if you get an inspiron then yeh, the build quality on them is less than the xps, latitude and alienware range are decent quality. also next business day on site service for all warranty repairs. I also do lenovo and apple warranty, they all have their good / bad models, and these 3 have best warranty terms, being on site instead of posting the machine away. Dell is probably even a bit better than the other two with promptness of sending the parts etc. So yer alienwares are pretty boss if you wanna spend that cash. They also have 2 HDD bays which you can either configure as mirrored raid (so if one hdd dies it automatically fails over to the other drive without any data loss). Or configure as two separate drives for maximum storage (something to think about with all those samples & plugins). If not alienware check the Dell XPS range, they are pretty boss too