I've been in IT for 11 years if you count a year at the Geek Squad. Anyway, I've run through Dell, HP, Lenovo, and whitebox at work, and Dell, Lenovo, Micron, Asus, and whitebox/self built at home. Gaming on the PC is kind of overrated IMHO - most games are console / mobile now, with ports or limited Steam releases on PC. Many Steam games are indies and so cross platform. Anyway, unless you're looking for a bit of a spendy hobby, game on consoles.
Gaming laptops are IMHO an oxymoron - you want opposite things for gaming and a laptop. And towers will pretty much always kill a laptop at any pricepoint. Plus you can really specifically specify parts in a custom build tower.
Anyway, ASUS is pretty middle of the road. My experiance is they're cheap priced in the laptop area, and the build quality matches that. However, if you're replacing them every 1.5 years or less for gaming purposes, you don't care much that they tend to die by 3 years.
Of the major vendors, I cannot recommend going business line enough. If you've always wondered why there are no PCs that are built as well as Apples's - the reason is you're not looking at similarly priced hardware in a segment that actually values build quality. I'd stack up a Thinkpad P50 against a Macbook most any day, and a Thinkstation P500 against a Mac Pro. After the Think branded Lenovos - which are about as good as you can get IMHO, there are the Dell Precision towers or Lattitude notebooks. And then there's everything else. It's not a small difference though, on a 10 point scale, I might rate Thinkpads and MacBooks a 9, the Dell Precisions are around a 6 and then everything else is... a short term purchase that I hope works when I get it.
One of the main reasons I'm moving gaming off to consoles is I have a real problem with how Microsoft is treating users with Windows 10, and I don't especially like the Apple ecosystem. That said, Apple is currently more respectful of its customers - and boy is that a change from just a couple years ago back to forever. The bar is that low. I like to own and control my computer, but it seems most commercial companies want to make our computers ever more like our mobile phones.
Gaming is now mostly GPU limited from my understanding - so really any reasonable CPU is fine. Of course it's nice to have a Xeon in a workstation though. RAM and mass storage are going to count for more in day to day use - if you can afford a M.2 SSD main drive, they are far and away the fastest mass storage you can get. I've tested out P500s with an M.2 at 2x a standard SATA SSD, which was 4x a 7200RPM SATA spinning disk. It easily approaches SAN device speeds - around 900 MB/sec for medium data transfers. Testing Xilinx on an M.2 vs a RAM Disk - the RAM Disk was only 30% faster than the M.2, which is pretty amazing.
