The quality of Alienware laptops hasn't dropped to my knowledge. The laptops have some of the best cooling performance, speakers, trackpads and mousepad in Windows laptops. Dell has actually killed their own high end gaming XPS series and now push Alienware.
That being said i have no experience with that bios boot stuff, so if that is critical to you, then you gotta research it.
From the laptops I suggested, Razer is quite expensive, but their build quality is on Apple level. ASUS has some premium unibody laptops as well and MSI is just a pretty great all rounder that;s usually a bit cheaper than the others.