Up ’til now, laptop PCs have not been the speed demons of the gaming world. Sure, Alienware will occasionally whip out a competent gamer’s notebook as will Rock and Dell, but few others care to enter this most rarified of markets. Until now.

Asustek, leading motherboard manufacturer, has entered the market with an overclockable, modular laptop, the C90, announced in the lead-up to the planet’s second largest computer show, Computex, in Taiwan.

The C90 won’t win the slugfest for toughest notebook; that will no doubt be won by either a Panasonic Toughbook, or upstart General Dynamics (must not have sold enough nuclear submarines this year) with their new Go-Books. But it surely takes the cake for most upgradable, for it’s designed to use desktop components, even the cheaper-but-hotter Conroe Core 2 Duo desktop CPUs, and Asustek worked with nVidia to ship MXM-type video adapters.

It looks as customizable as a Model T or Classic Beetle. However, the siren song of upgradability never has worked for laptops before, and as a veteran of the early laptop wars, I quickly found the more flexible the laptop is, the more it flexes, and the quicker it breaks.

Is upgradability important in a laptop, or do you think you’re better off with a notebook that’s factory-configured? Join the discussion.