For many years, Maingear was primarily known as a system integrator — a company building custom PCs, sort of bridging the the gap between a completely prebuilt PC with potentially locked down upgrades and the process of a DYI tower. Recently, though, the company started making its own original designs with the Maingear MG-1 we reviewed earlier this year.

Maingear also making gaming laptops, though, such as the ML-16. The company recently released its 2024 edition of this laptop, and I was happy to have the chance to review it. It's a pretty great gaming machine, with plenty of power to run any modern game despite the sleek and premium-looking chassis. But it's far from a perfect laptop, with a less than stellar keyboard and bad battery life out of the box.

About this review: Maingear sent me a unit of the ML-16 (2024) for the purposes of this review.

Pricing and availability

The Maingear ML-16 MK.II, as it's formally known, was announced and launched on June 18th, 2024, and it immediately became available Maingear's website.

Pricing starts at $1,799 for the base model, which includes a Core Ultra 7 155H, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. You can go all the way up to a GeForce RTX 4070 8GB GPU, 64GB of RAM, and 8TB of SSD storage across dual M.2 slots, which costs just over $3,000.

Design and ports

A sleek, premium-looking chassis

Maingear collaborated with Clevo for the design of the new ML-16 laptop, so it looks a bit different from its predecessor. Clevo specializes in high-performance gaming laptops, and what's been done here is fairly impressive. The Maingear ML-16 is a laptop that comes in at just under 20mm thick and weighs a little under two kilograms, meaning it's still decently portable for how much power it's packing. It's kind of comparable to something like Lenovo's Legion Slim 7 series in terms of size and performance.

The laptop looks pretty darn good, too. Most of the outer shell of the laptop is made of silver aluminum, but the hinge and the palm rest are black, which makes for a fun dual-tone design that I wish more laptops would attempt. It reminds me of the Alienware x16, and that's a good thing. It looks very premium without sacrificing uniqueness.

Unfortunately, that premium look isn't entirely reflected in how the laptop feels. For the most part, yes, this laptop feels very premium and solid in the hand, and there is little to complain about there. But I did notice an unusual amount of flex at the bottom of the display when the laptop is open. Both the front — where the display frame — is plastic, and the back — made of aluminum — move quite a bit when pressed down, and they don't even have to be pressed that hard. For a cheap laptop, that would be fine, but at this price, it's a bit more questionable.

It looks very premium without sacrificing uniqueness

For a gaming laptop, the Maingear ML-16 is also very subdued. There's next to no sign of RGB lighting on the entire chassis, which I honestly found a bit disappointing. The only hint of RGB is on the keyboard, and while Maingear's product page states it's a four-zone RGB keyboard, the included customization app shows no option for customizing different areas. It's effectively a single-zone RGB keyboard with a few colors to choose from. It's also not all that bright, so in daylight, it's pretty much useless. I had to close my blinds to be able to get a picture that actually showed off the lighting. All that is to say I was a bit disappointed on this front, but if you like subdued laptops, then you'll probably be happy.

A solid supply of ports

Turning to the port situation, the Maingear ML-16 does pretty well. It's pretty modern thanks to the inclusion of Thunderbolt 4 and a standard USB-C port that still supports DP Alt Mode, both on the right side of the machine. This side also houses a USB Type-A port and the proprietary charging connector.

The left side is home to another USB Type-A port, a headphone jack, and a microSD card reader, useful for bringing in photos from a camera. Rounding things out, there's an HDMI port and a Gigabit Ethernet port on the back of the laptop. This makes sense since, if you're using this as your main gaming PC at home, these are the two most likely ports to be constantly connected. Having them in the back makes things a bit easier.

Keyboard and touchpad

Typing was a challenge

Moving on to the keyboard, I have to say I didn't have the best time with the Maingear ML-16. The keys don't feel too bad to press, to be clear. There's a decent amount of travel and fairly satisfying tactile feedback when pressing the key, so it's not all bad.

The big problem stems from the inclusion of a number pad. The extra keys can be helpful for some things, but what ends up happening when a laptop has a number pad is that all the keys are pushed to the side compared to where you expect them to be, and in this case, I found myself pressing the wrong keys more often than any other laptop I can recall. You can probably get used to it in time, but even after a few days, I still pressed the wrong keys more often than I should. Of course, there's also the matter of the lackluster RGB lighting, but we've gone over that.

Even after a few days, I still pressed the wrong keys more often than I should

On the other hand, the touchpad here is phenomenal. This is an area that often suffers when it comes to gaming laptops, but Maingear nailed it with this model. The touchpad has a super soft and smooth finish that makes it very pleasant and easy to use, so it's a total win in my book.

Display

It's definitely a screen

As the name indicates, the Maingear ML-16 packs a 16-inch display, and it comes in a 16:10 aspect ratio, which has thankfully become the norm for premium laptops. It comes in Quad HD+ resolution and has a 240Hz refresh rate, and those specs are consistent for every configuration, which helps justify the price tag of the machine a bit more.

I found this display to be totally fine. I wasn't blown away by it, but it gets the job done pretty well, and there are no glaring flaws I could see. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that the refresh rate isn't dynamic. It's a 240Hz panel, and it can run at either 240Hz or the 60Hz, with the former being the default even on battery power. That's a big battery drain, and it would definitely have been good to have a bit more control here.

For gaming, that super high refresh rate is going to be great

Maingear's spec sheet makes no mention of brightness, color coverage, or HDR support, but I can say the laptop does support HDR. However, it's still an IPS panel, so the HDR experience isn't going to be mind-blowing.

I tested the color coverage using a SpyderX Pro sensor, and the results I got were alright. The screen covers 99% of sRGB and 76% of DCI-P3, which aligns with my experience. It's good, but not outstanding in any way.

Meanwhile, brightness maxed out at a little over 400 nits, which is also solid. Again, it's not the best out there, but it's solid enough. HDR brightness should be higher, but the SpyderX sensor can't reliably measure HDR readings.

All in all, it's a fine display, and for gaming, that super high refresh rate is going to be great. Personally, I'd take some more vibrant colors over that extra smoothness, though.

Webcam and audio

Above the display, the Maingear ML-16 houses a 1080p webcam, which comes with an IR sensor for Windows Hello facial recognition. I will never not appreciate that inclusion; I love Windows Hello, and gaming laptops often overlook this, so I'm thrilled to see it. The webcam itself is pretty solid, too, another somewhat rare sight for a gaming laptop. I used it for a few meetings, and I never got any complaints regarding the quality. Here's a sample of what it can do in good lighting conditions. Of course, quality gets worse as you have less light.

As for audio, the speaker setup here is pretty good. It gets impressively loud, and the quality is solid. My benchmark for audio has usually been the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, which is fantastic. Compared to that, the Maingear ML-16 gets noticeably louder, but it sounds a little bit muddier, though not by much. For the sake of immersion in games or even movies, I think these speakers do a great job.

Performance

It's a powerful laptop

As you'd expect from a gaming laptop, the Maingear ML-16 is a pretty powerful laptop. It's designed to be thin, so it's not as powerful as some others, but it's still very good. Every configuration comes with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor, and then you can choose between an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or RTX 4070 8GB, and my unit comes with the latter. My model also includes 64GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD, so I have a very high-end configuration.

This is exactly the kind of configuration you'd expect from a premium thin gaming laptop, though the inclusion of two RAM slots and two M.2 SSD is better than many other gaming laptops that aim to be sleek.

This machine can handle any and all modern games without issues

In real life usage, performance from this machine has been great, at least when plugged in. As usual, unplugging a gaming laptop from the AC adapter slashes the performance a lot, but otherwise, the laptop performs very well. Of course, I tried gaming on it, and performance was great across the board. Here's a quick rundown of the performance I got in different games:

Suffice it to say this machine can handle any and all modern games without issues. Sure, playing Cyberpunk 2077 at 32FPS isn't ideal, especially considering fluctuations in framerate, but the RT Overdrive preset is the highest available, and you can definitely tone things down a bit to get a smoother experience. This is a very good laptop for gaming, make no mistake.

Of course, I also ran the usual suite of benchmarks, and the Maingear ML-16 held its own fairly well.

Naturally, having the GPU limited to 105W is going to have some impact on performance, but the Maingear ML-16 comes fairly close to the much larger and heavier Omen 17 in terms of GPU performance, and it's neck-and-neck CPU-wise. It's also ahead of the Radeon RX 7600M XT used in a mini desktop PC, which has 120W of power as well. It's decently powerful all around.

Battery life is terrible

The big problem with all gaming laptops is always going to be battery life, but I actually thought things would be a bit better on a laptop using Intel Core Ultra chips and a less power-hungry GPU. Unfortunately, that's not the case. I did most of my battery testing with the display at 240Hz, since that's the default setting, and maybe because of that, the battery life results were atrocious. The minimum I got was about 2 hours and 17 minutes, while the maximum was three hours and 15 minutes. This is far from impressive or even good. On some days, I fully drained the battery twice while working.

I'm sure lowering the refresh rate would help here, but that tells me two things. First, maybe Maingear should have made that the default setting when using the laptop on battery power. Secondly, this display really should have a dynamic refresh rate. Being forced to choose between 60Hz and 240Hz sucks, because you either get a pretty lame display experience or horrendous battery life.

Should you buy the Maingear ML-16?

Whether you should get this laptop really depends on how much you care about the portability factor of it. Lenovo hasn't refreshed its Legion Slim 7 series for 2024, so the Maingear ML-16 offers an excellent combination of performance and portability. It's one of the lightest 16-inch gaming laptops around with this kind of power, and that can't be understated. That alone makes it a solid choice, and when you have a solid display, great speakers, and a fairly premium chassis, it's hard to ask for much more.

You can't really get a laptop that matches the performance and design of this laptop for the same price. You can get more performance for a lower price, but you have to sacrifice the portability aspect, and in many cases, upgrade options. Remember, this laptop has both upgradeable RAM and storage despite its relatively thin design. I'd say it's worth a shot if you don't mind some of its downfalls.

You should buy the Maingear ML-16 if:

• You want a sleek gaming laptop that's still very fast
• You're looking for something with a more subdued look
• You don't care about battery life

You shouldn't buy the Maingear ML-16 if:

• You want to use the laptop away from an outlet for a day
• You want a great laptop display
• You want top-tier performance and don't care about portability