Overview

Maingear has a 17-in gaming notebook that is surprisingly powerful and surprisingly thin.

The notebook market of today barely resembles the notebook market of 5 years ago. People are spending less money on their computers than ever before, and we find even sub $1000 options are adequate for casual 1080p gaming. However the high-end, boutique gaming notebook hasn’t been forgotten. Companies like Maingear still forge on to try to provide a no compromise portable gaming experience. Today, we look at the Maingear Pulse 17 gaming laptop.

The most striking feature of the Pulse 17 is the namesake 17-in display. While we are used to seeing gaming laptops fall in the 15-in or higher range, there is something to be said about opening up the Pulse and being greeted by a massive display with 1080p resolution. The choice of a 17-in display here also enables one of the most impressive parts of this notebook, the thickness.

When most people think about gaming laptops, their minds go to the gigantic bricks of the past, The Pulse 17 manages to provide gaming power in a similar thickness to the average ultrabook at 0.86”.  In fact, the form factor is similar to what I’d imagine a 17” MacBook Pro Retina as, if Apple decided to use a display that large.

Even though the screen size creates a large footprint for the Pulse 17, both the thickness, and the 6lb weight make this the first truly portable gaming laptop I have used.

Comparing the physical form of the Pulse 17 to a notebook like the ASUS G750JX, which we reviewed late last year, is almost comical. The G750 weighs in at 10lbs and just under 2” thick while toting similar hardware and performance to the Pulse 17.

Top: Maingear Pulse 17, Bottom: ASUS G750JX

Beyond physical attributes, the Pulse 17 has a lot to offer from a hardware standpoint. The Intel Core i7-4700HQ processor and NVIDIA GTX 765M GPU (as tested, it now ships with a 870M) mean that you’ll have all that you need to play any modern game on the integrated 1080p display.

Storage is provided by a 1TB Hard Drive, as well as 2x128GB mSATA SSDs in SuperRAID 0 to provide maximum throughput.

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