Santa Clara (CA) – Asus announced its long-awaited Ares gaming PC in the U.S. as well as a more affordable gaming notebook.

The Ares CG6155 is available with pretty much any tech money can buy these days – including a Core 2 Extreme QX9650 CPU, up to 4 TB of HDD space, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, up to 8 GB of DDR3 memory, up to three Nvidia GeForce GTX280 graphics cards as well as a liquid cooling system. The power supply supports of to 2 KW.

Pricing has not been released, but do not expect this beast to be available below $5000.

More affordable are Asus G50 and G71 gaming notebooks, which went on sale at Best Buy for $1250. However, the notebooks at Best Buy do not quite match the specifications provided by Asus, namely the 9700M GT Nvidia GPU. Best Buy lists the notebook with a 9800M GS graphics processor – and an Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 (2.26 GHz) processor, 4 GB of memory and a 320 GB hard drive.

The 15.6” device (1366x768) isn’t exactly light and weighs in at 7.3 pounds, but the specifications indicate a solid mainstream gaming notebook for those who don’t quite look for bragging rights and the latest and greatest hardware.