Spend my money for me

I think you should go for a gaming specific machine to play those games. Alienware do some nice ones, for example:

http://www.dell.com/uk/p/alienware-m17x-r3/pd

I doubt, as you say, Dell could cope and not sure about Apples with no experience of those.

All I can say is avoid Mesh, nightmare who I had claim money back from after 6 weeks with no machine! 

Edit: I see Dell bought Alienware - see the link!! I now men standard Dell.....

I have to agree, Alienware make nice gaming laptops.

I've heard that the alienware stuff can be overpriced.  Has anyone got any experience of these machines?

Any more suggestions?

for that system you'd want to bump it to a gtx580 and that takes price to £1700 if you select no other upgrades. Forget upgrading the processor. an i7 is and i7 is an i7 and you can pretty much choose the speed it operates yourself. Just the 580 will have the vram you need for bf3 because bf3 is going to be a 1536mb monster.

BF3, on a laptop! jeez.

Id have to suggest a purpose built "gaming laptop. Or to really study the internal parts (of a gaming laptop), then look for a laptop with similiar specs. £1500 is a lot of money to spend, id doubt you would end up spending that much tbh.

Ive just built a purpose built gaming pc (full tower), cost £650 + £150 for lcd monitor, by buying kit that had great reviews and 5 stars on Toms hardware.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/

TBH, my advice would be don't buy a laptop if you are serious about gaming. Spend just £1k on a well-spec'ed desktop gaming pc (e.g. 580ti, i7, 8gb ram, F1 drives) and it will run even Crysis 2 smoothly and beat anything you can get with a laptop worth many times more, and you can continually upgrade a desktop. And you can use your tv or get a decent new lcd for < £300. Of course I understand if space is an issue, but IMO it is worth it.

As long as it has an i5 or higher in it, don't bother too much about the CPU, focus mainly on the GPU.

Just look for the GPU in the laptop, then check this chart: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Computer-Games-on-Laptop-Graphic-Cards.1384...

The last system on this page might be good for you, the specs are good for the price, though you will need to take customs charges into account: http://www.ibuypower.com/IbpPages/Notebook.aspx

I understand that a desktop is the better and cheaper option however it is out of the question. I serve in the armed forces and hence spend most of my time on the move.  A laptop is very important to me; music, movies, internet, pictures the whole lot will be done on it both when I am away and at home.

Gaming is something I do when I'm bored and have run out of films or books on my kindle so it won't need to run it on ultra settings but high would certainly be required.

Cheers for the suggestions.... keep them coming

By the way I'm not interested in 3D, webcams, card readers, SSD, huge hard drives (500GB max as almost everything is stored on external HD) or any other 'throw away components' that people put in to make their machines look good.

Connectors it needs: HDMI, ethernet, wirless, usb 3.0, headphone, normal monitor connector VGA, bluetooth purly for a remote control.  The rest are just a waste of space.

DVD drive doesn't need to be anything too funky, not too fussed about Blu-Ray.  I'd probably consider an external drive as I rarely use it.

Speakers don't have to be special, just not appalling!

Hope that helps.

Bump for OP 

I have an Asus G73 which cost me around £1500. 17" 1920x1080, 640 GB HDD, 6GB RAM (I think they come in 6 or 8 ), i7 , ATi Mobility HD5870 and a backlit Keyboard.

Plays everything, is good looking (imo) and solidly built. You won't get near this spec on Apple hardware for anywhere near the price.

Only negatives, heavy for a laptop, and a sub 2 hour battery life (but I use it as "portable" rather than laptop).

Thanks guys for the help. I've looked into the asus laptop but struggling to find someone supplying 15" models at a sensible price; most places seem to be sold out.

It would be so simple if someone would just build a laptop with no 'gumf' on it just to pad out the stats page. I cant help but feel I'm paying for stuff that I will never use whilst getting extra weight, cooling problems and possibly extra power consumption in return.

Anima, hope you get what you need soon. 

You can dual boot apple with windows and i think the higher end mac book pro's will give you the abillity to play these games you ask for but at a serious price.

The cheaper version would be Alienware laptops, though they look alittle out of place with anyone who is aged 30+

There is another company called ROCK which i have had a gaming computer from which was pretty good though it doesn't match the power of the Alienware though they are alittle cheaper 

Asus do a good gaming laptop 

I really wouldn't touch many other company's though it would be a good idea to see what PC Pro website to see what they recommend. 

If it wasn't for gaming i would say go for any of the apple laptops though i am biased after years of hassel with PC and Windows based laptops ( apart from 1 laptop ) i still have my iMac after 2 years and still love it to bits