Help me choose one of these laptops!

So I realised I'm fed up with the slowness of my current PC (Athlon 64 1.8Ghz, 1GB RAM, 7300GT) and decided to upgrade, by purchasing a laptop - portable, and much more convenient. It's going to be used mainly for 3D modelling, rendering, etc. And of course a bit of gaming (it must run STALKER or BioShock smoothly on a low resolution on low-medium details at least).

However I have a special demand regarding the specs. It must have a 17 inch WUXGA (1920x1200) screen at least, otherwise no laptop. This wouldn't be a problem if I lived in a *real* country, but here in Romania, I cannot customize and purchase a laptop to my liking. I have to spend hours searching for something already configured and imported. I only found a handful of laptops with a WUXGA display here, and there is no way I could order one from outside - too much of a hassle and too much taxes. I need a little help deciding between the laptops I found.

Naturally, I want some other decent specs too: for the graphic card, 8600M GT or higher and at least 3GB of RAM. HDD, battery life, OS not important.

First option is the DELL Studio 1535. T9300 2.5Ghz CPU, 4GB RAM and HD 3450 256MB. The problem with this one is that it only has a 15 inch WUXGA screen, and that's too small to work comfortable with. But the biggest problem is the videocard which is just too weak. The CPU on the other hand is pretty good for my needs. If I lived some place else, I could get the 17 inch version of this, same specs, but with a much much better Radeon HD 3650 graphic card. Not possible tho'. :_;

Second option is the Acer Aspire 8930g. It has a 18.4 inch display with only 1920x1080 (Full HD 16:9) but that's a compromise I might be willing to make. The problem is that the CPU is weaker than the Dell Studio's one, and it only has 1 year warranty (the Dell has 3). However I might be able to purchase a warranty extension to 3 years. On the plus side the graphic card is pretty good and it has a ton of connectivity options. But, I have some problems with the resolution - 16:9 aspect ratio, and I keep thinking that might be a problem when playing some older games which don't support it, and I really don't want any stretched images.

Third option is the DELL Vostro 1710. Perfect display, but only 2 GB of RAM and a relatively weak graphic card. Still acceptable tho', but a bit overpriced (it costs as much as the Acer). However I read some nasty things about the nVidia mobile 8xxx series - overheating and not lasting more than a couple of months.


So here are my questions:

Which one of these would be the best option price/ratio?
Which one would you choose?
How would you say the image sharpness would be when reducing the resolution to something non-native (I only used CRT displays)?

I read something about keeping the resolution a divider of 1920x1200 - like 960x600 (or 960 x 540 for 16:9 aspect ratio) for best sharpness/results, but the question is, are those supported resolution in games? Because the videocards in these laptops can't run modern games smoothly at their native resolution, I am planning on playing on lower res..but I don't want stretched images, black bars or blurry images. Since these displays are quite fine - 120 ppi for the Acer, 147 ppi for the Dell Studio and 133 ppi for the Vostro - I presume when running at non-native the blurriness won't be that apparent.