I used to work at an HP call center and the HP's came in waves, new models every few months. Wondering if the Dell laptops do the same, I'm deploying to Iraq in Jan. and looking at a Inspiron 9300 base of $890 with the X300 through the BX, I can put in a geforce 6800 for $200 extra. Trying to decide if I should go for it or wait since I dont need it for a couple month, either wait for new models or play it like at a car dealership and buy it for a better price right before the new models come out.

In all honesty I'd say wait till early December when Sales starts to push out the Christmas deals. They won't release any new systems until Feb more than likely to sell out of the stock left of the older models. They have tried otherwise before but ended up with overstock because the older models would sell quicker since they were more heavily advertised for the past few months. I won't tell you what to buy, but if you like gaming the 9300/XPS Gen2/XPS M170 is a good line to go. If you game some but just need it mostly for work related, I'd say a less expensive 6000/Ins 630/XPS M140 would be a nice choice.  
 
Your Friendly Government Dell Tech,
J
Dell Rep ID - 172946

this will probably be 98% gaming but the XPS pricetag is a bit too high for me, the way I configured the 9300 with the geforce 6800 it comes to about $1100, through the bx website so its tax and shipping free

That is excellent, I use the exact same system for LAN parties, just make sure you get atleast the 2.0Ghz processor or you'll notice a large differance in performance (it has a larger L2 cache)
 
Your Friendly Government Dell Tech,
J
Dell Rep ID - 172946

for $1100 configured its the Pentium M 740 @ 1.73ghz, 512MB and the Geforce 6800, the 2 ghz would be $200 more, I've been considering going 1 gig of ram for $100 more

trust me, the 2gig proc and 1gig RAM will make an improvment on your gameplay. Without it, Doom3 will run... well... you don't want to know.
 
Your Friendly Government Dell Tech,
J
Dell Rep ID - 172946