Voodoo Envy M460

The Voodoo Envy M460 laptop comes in eight exotic colors, including Range Rover Black and British Racing Green. Like a high-performance race car, it comes outfitted with top-notch parts, including a Pentium 4-M processor and ATI's Mobility Radeon 9600.

Upside: As its name implies, this 5.5-pound, 1.1-inch-thick laptop will be the envy of your gaming friends. It is one of the first notebooks to feature ATI's Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics chip with DirectX 9.0 support. Best of all, the system houses the GPU and the memory on a separate daughterboard, which means you can upgrade the graphics without buying a whole new machine. The Voodoo Envy M460 comes with a 15-inch display; a 2.2GHz to 2.6GHz Pentium 4-M processor; a 40GB, 60GB, or 80GB hard drive running at 4,200, 5,400, or 7,200rpm, respectively; and built-in 802.11b.

Downside: With a base price of more than $2,600, this laptop is expensive. Nor is there a DVD-burner option, and each Voodoo Envy M460 comes with only 512MB of RAM. The laptop supports up to 1GB of memory, but you'll have to add it on your own for now.

Outlook: Hard-core gamers will definitely want to test-drive the Voodoo Envy M460. It offers cutting-edge technologies and an eye-catching chassis. Whether it can deliver gut-wrenching performance, however, remains to be seen.