Kukri, regarding the 7700:

I had the base (1 year) warranty due to a combination of over confidence in their brand and in my own technical skill. I had trouble with it through the year, including it arriving in a non-working state and requiring some work right off the bat. Shortly after my warranty expired, so did my motherboard. I could've replaced the video card, but no one sells the motherboard, and I almost certainly couldn't have replaced it at home anyway. $500 bucks to fix it.

Now the interesting part, Alienware replaced the graphics card (Which was working fine, as verified by me and a CompUSA tech) with a newer and significantly better model. When I contacted them, their only explanation was that the older card wasn't being made anymore (A flat lie). A little digging on my part revealed that they did this with a lot of other people too, and the general opinion was that they'd discovered that their case design was simply unable to handle the heat load from the older card. I also got some invaluable advice:

1. Run the fans at 100% all the time (Undocumented command: function-F2), and use Speed Fan to monitor internal temps. (http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php)

2. Clean the fans regularly with compressed air, especially the one under the GPU. Check and replace the thermal grease under the GPU if cleaning the fans doesn't bring temperatures as reported by Speed Fan back to a normal range for your system.

3. Listen to the fans (It's hard not to, they're quite loud) and be aware of changes in their sound as running the fans that hard will cause them to wear out more quickly, but it's muuuuch cheaper to replace the fans than to replace your GPU or etc. They should last a long time, but there's no guarantee.

How do you know what temperatures are normal? There's no definitive guide because of the variations in hardware with the 7700, just do your normal activities for a few hours under good conditions and see where it rests.

Good luck Kukri. It always sooths my burn a little bit to hear people who were smart enough to buy the extended warranty and make Alienware eat their mistake.