Yes, I agree with the ASUS suggestion but what are you willing to pay for in a laptop? From what I heard the G series of the ASUS laptops are and so-so on reliability. From my experience the N series of the ASUS laptops are well made. I own one and other than a known bad hard drive going bad after ten months(I cloned the hard drive and replaced it, easy fix), the thing is solid. I also had to do maintenance after ten months but holds well and you are supposed to replace thermal paste every year or two in high powered laptops. My 17" N-Series laptop has a Core 2 Quad at 2GHz and a Geforce GT 240M, it plays today's games ok these days. Also feels nice with the rubber layer over it's plastic panel around the keyboard.
You can grab this laptop for $1199,99:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230078Has a quad core i7, 750GB 7200rpm HDD, 6GB of DDR3 1333 RAM, GeForce GT 540M(DirectX 11 games!), and a Blu-Ray Drive. The graphics card has it's own 1GB of RAM and not using any from the system. It has a 17.3" screen at 1080P resolution which is big and it weighs 7.5 pounds. The RAM can be upgraded to 12GB and the warranty is two years with one year of accidental coverage by ASUS. You also have a USB 3.0 port to take advantage of for large file transfers with three other USB 2.0 ports for other devices.
I looked at the laptops that were for sale for 16" screens but it seems people either want a big screen or a modest sized one since there was a rather small selection. Not to mention the laptops are not that highly regarded as good or are refurbs.