The reason I was looking at Alienware & Asus gaming rigs was for the CPU and RAM, not the graphics. They also both claimed soundcards a little above the norm. That said, I hadn't considered an external sound card, which should make things a bit simpler.  I've been buying PCs since 1984 and have probably owned just about every major brand since. One of my current desktops is an Alienware box and it has given me less trouble than any other Dell (or HP for that matter) I've owned.
 
 

Dell XPS17. Love it

@TerraSin - You are QUITE correct with the point about the gaming machines having desirable traits of generally higher-end processors and usually more memory - I was only trying to really indicate that the graphics part of the equation is not really the thing to focus on when choosing a computer for music production software, such as Sonar.
 
Thanks for adding that info with your post :)
 
Bob Bone
 

tchafin
I can see I have some more homework to do. I'd never heard of ADK Pro Audio, but just checked out their site - looks doable. Oddly enough, I pretty much live on Lenovo's at work - never thought of them as a possibility.

I have a three year old ADK laptop I'm willing to sell. Turns out I have not done one lick of remote recording. PM me.

I've had really good luck with my HP Envy.  They are really easy to work on/upgrade, and you can get them spec'd how you'd like.  I've got a 4th Gen i7 quad core with 16G or RAM.  The fans are a little noisy compared to other models, but the last BIOS update they had seemed to fix alot of these problems.
 
The one advantage about gaming computers, is that having a Deseret graphics card takes load off your CPU for running graphics.  So not necessarily a gaming PC, but if you can find a computer with an i5 or i7 and a descrete graphics card either AMD or NVidia, it will take a huge load off your machine.  You have to manually set your descrete graphics to open with Sonar, otherwise it will default to the built-in Intel graphics, as Sonar doesn't do 3D rendering.