Maingear Ultima 18 review: Over-the-top power, old-school design

Price When Reviewed

$3,599

Best Prices Today: Maingear Ultima 18

Fifteen years ago, I had a gaming laptop that was a big heavy brick. I loved it! That’s what gaming laptops were back then. The 18-inch Maingear Ultima 18 feels like a modern spiritual successor to big-and-heavy gaming laptops. That’s awesome, but it also shows where these designs stumble.

To create the Ultima 18, Maingear packed a big Clevo laptop chassis full of high-end components. It goes overboard in some interesting ways with hard-to-find specs. But for $3,599, it’s competing with modern high-end gaming laptops that deliver a more polished experience. Those polished machines — with their software tweaks and cutting-edge cooling systems — often edge out the Ultima 18 on performance, and they’re available at a similar price.

It’s a good machine. I’m just not sure whether it’s your best option around this price point, unless you’re smitten by the unique features it offers. And you might be!

Maingear Ultima 18: Specs

The Maingear Ultima 18 combines a blazing-fast 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor with other high-end components. Our review model had an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 processor, but you can also get this with a top-of-the-line RTX 5090 GPU.

While our $3,599 review unit had 32 GB of DDR5 RAM and a 2 TB SSD, you can get this machine with up to 192 GB of RAM. This machine has two 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports for wired networking — I haven’t seen a dual Ethernet setup like that on another modern gaming laptop. Plus, there’s room inside this monster of a laptop for four M.2 SSDs. And the Ultima 18 has an 18-inch 4K display, too — with a fast 200Hz refresh rate. Maingear isn’t playing around.

Features like the two Ethernet ports and four M.2 drive bays are way above and beyond. Some people will surely hunt down this specific laptop just for those features.

• Model number: Maingear Ultima 18 RTX 5080
• CPU: Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX
• Memory: 32 GB DDR5 RAM
• Graphics/GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080
• NPU: Intel AI Boost (13 TOPS)
• Display: 18-inch 3840×2400 IPS display with 200Hz refresh rate
• Storage: 2 TB PCIe Gen4 SSD
• Webcam: 1080p webcam
• Connectivity: 2x Thunderbolt 5 (USB Type-C), 2x USB Type-A, 2x 2.5Gb Ethernet, 1x combo audio jack, 1x HDMI 2.1 out, 1x microSD reader, 1x Kensington lock slot, 1x DC power in
• Networking: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, Ethernet
• Biometrics: IR camera for facial recognition
• Battery capacity: 98 Watt-hours
• Dimensions: 16.14 x 12.56 x 1.42 inches
• Weight: 8.8 pounds
• MSRP: $3,599 as tested

Features like the two Ethernet ports and four M.2 drive bays are way above and beyond. Some people will surely hunt down this specific laptop just for those features.

Maingear Ultima 18: Design and build quality

The Maingear Ultima 18 takes me back. This 18-inch laptop weighs 8.8 pounds and is 1.42 inches thick at its thickest point — it’s a brick. It’s based on a Clevo chassis. (Clevo produces laptop designs that system builders like Maingear use to create and release their own laptops.)

If you’re looking for a brick of a gaming laptop, however, it’s designed well. With a metal lid and palm rest, it doesn’t feel plasticky. But it also doesn’t feel like a single piece of metal, like some other high-end gaming laptops. The hinge is easy to open with one hand. It feels solid for an 8.8 pound 18-inch gaming laptop, but this is the kind of machine you’ll need to be careful with — I wouldn’t pick it up from the corner with one hand.

The design features a lot of black, broken up by the “Maingear” name below the display and the logo on the lid. With animated RGB lightbars at the rear of the machine and RGB lighting on the keyboard, that’s where the “gamer” aesthetic comes from — but, of course, it’s customizable.

Somewhat unusually for a modern gaming laptop, this laptop has small LEDs on the front edge, to the right of the touchpad. In normal use, the left one will be lit when your laptop is on, the middle one will be lit when your laptop is plugged in, and the right one will blink as your laptop uses its storage. These used to be much more common, but they’re the kind of thing most manufacturers omit these days.

The design is traditional in another way: The laptop blows hot air out of both sides of the laptop as well as the back. I prefer modern designs that don’t blow hot air toward my mouse hand. However, most of the hot air does come out the back, so it’s not too bad. The cooling also keeps the WASD area of the keyboard fairly cool. The fans get loud under load, though — this is closer to the traditional “jet engine” fan profile on a brick laptop, whereas many modern laptops have found ways to make them quieter.

Maingear proudly proclaims that this is a “zero-bloatware Windows 11 installation,” and that’s excellent to see. You get a few utilities for your hardware — from Maingear, Nvidia, and Creative — and that’s about it. There are no nags to pay for antivirus software here. Our review model also came with Windows 11 Pro, which is nice.

Maingear Ultima 18: Keyboard and trackpad

The Maingear Ultima 18 has a full-size chiclet membrane keyboard complete with a number pad. It has per-key RGB backlighting for maximum customization.

With 1.5mm of key travel, the keyboard feels good to game on. It doesn’t quite feel as premium as the rest of the machine, though: It’s no mechanical keyboard, like you’ll find on some versions of the Alienware 16 Area-51, and it doesn’t have the stronger actuation force you’ll find on machines like the Razer Blade. I prefer a clickier experience.

The trackpad is large and makes good use of the available palm-rest space. It’s nice and smooth — Maingear says it has a “low friction finish.” While it’s not quite as smooth as the swankiest glass touchpads I’ve used, it gets most of the way there. The click-down action feels crisp.

Maingear Ultima 18: Display and speakers

The Maingear Ultima 18 has an 18-inch 4K IPS display (3840×2400 resolution). That’s impressive when other laptops in this class often deliver WXGA (2560×1600) displays instead. The display has a 200Hz refresh rate and support for Nvidia G-Sync, too. Brightness could be better: 400 nits is fine, but many laptop displays go brighter. At that brightness, you not getting HDR.

The display is exactly what it sounds like on paper — a big 18-inch 4K display with a high refresh rate. It’s nice. But resolution isn’t everything, and gaming laptops with lower-resolution displays often deliver more brightness and extra-vivid colors with bonus features like HDR in games — especially if they have OLED displays. (And, as you might expect, this isn’t a touch screen.)

This machine includes a subwoofer as well as two main speakers and two tweeters. It’s also powered by Sound Blaster Studio Pro 2. The bass is pretty good for a laptop, which is no surprise — most laptops don’t have subwoofers!

I test every laptop I review with Steely Dan’s Aja and Daft Punk’s Get Lucky. There’s more than enough volume here, and there’s enough bass to make the sound feel “full” in songs like Get Lucky. You aren’t getting audiophile-grade detail here, though — the instrument separation in Aja isn’t as crisp as it would be on a high-end pair of speakers, with the sounds blurring together a bit instead of separating.

The speakers provided good sound in Doom: The Dark Ages — with a chunky sound to the shotgun blast, for example. But the lack of clean separation of sounds at the high-end — plus those loud fans — would push me to use a good pair of headphones. (That’s normal for any laptop, though.)

Maingear Ultima 18: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

The Maingear Ultima 18’s 1080p webcam looks decent. It’s a tad grainy, and I’ve seen business laptops with higher-end webcams. For a gaming laptop, this is good — but not mind-blowing. It also has a physical privacy cover, which is always great to see.

This 18-inch laptop has a microphone that works and certainly picks up enough volume. This is a pretty standard gaming laptop mic, but the noise cancellation wasn’t great — it picked up the whirring of fans in the background. The microphone isn’t up to the audio quality I see on many business laptops, which are optimized for online meetings — you’ll want an external microphone to chat while gaming.

This machine has presence-sensing hardware, too. If you want, you can have Windows automatically wake your PC when you sit down in front of it or put it to sleep when you step away.

The Maingear Ultima 18 has an IR camera for Windows Hello sign-in support. You can log into your PC with your face, and it works well. This machine doesn’t have a fingerprint reader.

Maingear Ultima 18: Connectivity

The Maingear Ultima 18 offers a lot of connectivity options. On the left side, this machine has a combo audio jack and two USB Type-A ports — both are 10Gbps, and one has Power Delivery.

On the right side, you’ll find two Thunderbolt 5 (USB Type-C) ports as well as a microSD card slot. This being a high-end gaming laptop, it’s great to see future-proof Thunderbolt 5 — even though few peripherals are taking advantage of it yet.

On the back, you’ll find the power adapter connection, a Kensington lock slot, HDMI 2.1 out, and two Ethernet jacks (both 2.5Gbps.) That two Ethernet jack setup is completely over the top — most people buying this laptop won’t take advantage of it — but it’s impressive and unusual.

This machine has Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support, too, so it supports the latest standards. I had no problems with the Wi-Fi.

Maingear Ultima 18: Performance

The Maingear Ultima 18 delivered solid gaming performance — once I configured it. Out of the box, benchmark results were on the slow side compared to other similar laptops. Once I went into the Maingear Control Center and set it to “Performance” mode — and then went into Windows 11’s Settings and set it to Best Performance while plugged in — the performance ended up where I expected to see it. The benchmarks below were performed with these settings changed.

On many gaming laptops, this is now automatic: The manufacturer-provided software automatically switches your gaming laptop into higher-performance modes when you launch games. On this machine, you’ll be doing it yourself.

However, this is strong hardware, and it performed well in real-world gaming. The results were impacted by a few things, though. In Metro: Exodus, for example, I only saw competitive performance once I disabled the integrated GPU in the Maingear control center.  And I do feel like machines like the Alienware 16 Area-51 have a more efficient cooling setup that seems to lead to higher top-end performance.

As always, though we ran the Maingear Ultima 18 through our standard benchmarks to see how it performs.

First, we run PCMark 10 to get an idea of overall system performance. It’s designed to be a holistic benchmark, but the CPU is a major factor in this test. With an overall PCMark 10 score of 8,700, this machine delivered impressive performance on par with other Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX-powered machines like the Alienware 16 Area-51.

Next, we run Cinebench R20. This is a heavily multithreaded benchmark that focuses on overall CPU performance. It’s a quick benchmark, so cooling under extended workloads isn’t a factor. But, since it’s heavily multithreaded, CPUs with more cores have a huge advantage.

The Maingear Ultima 18 produced a multi-threaded Cinebench R20 score of 14,502, right in line with other laptops with the same CPU.

We also run an encode with Handbrake. This is another heavily multithreaded benchmark, but it runs over an extended period of time. This demands the laptop’s cooling kick in, and many laptops will throttle and slow down under load.

The Ultima 18 completed the encode process in an average of 458 seconds, which is just over seven and a half minutes. That’s about what we’d expect to see with this CPU, although it lags a little behind laptops like the Alienware 16 Area-51 and HP Omen Max 16, which suggests those machines may have better cooling setups to avoid throttling due to heat.

Next, we run a graphical benchmark. First, we run 3Dmark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance. With a 3Dmark Time Spy score of 19,168, this machine comes in about 10 percent behind other similar laptops on graphics performance.

(Performance on this particular benchmark went up by five percent after disabling the integrated GPU in the Maingear control center. With a score of about 19,902, it was more in line with similar laptops.)

Then, we benchmark some games. We start with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, an older game — but a great way to compare performance across hardware. With an average FPS of 190 in our standard benchmark here, this machine is in line with other similar laptops with RTX 5080 and even RTX 5090 GPUs.

Finally, we benchmark a demanding game. We run the Extreme benchmark in Metro Exodus. For this benchmark, the laptop was consistently coming in far behind with an average of 73 FPS. After I went into the Maingear control panel and disabled the integrated Intel GPU — setting it to the discrete Nvidia GPU only — and rebooted, performance went up. After that change was made, the Maingear Ultima 18 delivered a competitive 87 frames per second in this benchmark.

While that’s competitive, it still comes in a few frames behind laptops like the Alienware 16 Area-51, likely thanks to their better cooling designs. And those machines didn’t need any extra tweaking.

Overall, the performance is competitive, but it needs tweaking — and the cooling setup just isn’t as impressive as it is on many other gaming laptops. That leads to a reduction in performance.

Maingear Ultima 18: Battery life

The Maingear Ultima 18 has a huge 98 Watt-hour battery. That’s as big as it gets — any larger and the U.S. Transportation Security Administration wouldn’t allow it on an airplane! An 18-inch brick of a gaming laptop like this one isn’t designed for long battery life, however.

To benchmark the battery life, we play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on repeat on Windows 11 with airplane mode enabled until the laptop suspends itself. We set the screen to 250 nits of brightness for our battery benchmarks. This is a best-case scenario for any laptop since local video playback is so efficient, and real battery life in day-to-day use is always going to be less than this.

The Maingear Ultima 18 lasted an average of 288 minutes during our benchmark — that’s just under five hours. You’ll be able to get a few hours of work out of it, if you need to, but you’ll need to plug in for maximum gaming performance, anyway.

Maingear Ultima 18: Conclusion

The Maingear Ultima 18 impressed me when I unboxed it. The design is somewhere between an old-school gaming laptop brick and a modern gaming laptop, and features like four drive bays, two Ethernet jacks, two Thunderbolt 5 ports, and a 4K 200Hz display feel nicely over the top. While it feels big and heavy, the hardware justifies it.

But the impressive specs become a bit less than the sum of their parts. Compared to this machine, many modern gaming laptops are lighter, have a more impressive metal design, a more advanced cooling system, don’t need this much tweaking to perform well, and have other high-end touches like a mechanical keyboard and more carefully tuned speaker setup.

Don’t get me wrong — this is a good laptop! I’d be happy to use it. But it’s also $3,599. And it has a lot of competition at that price range.

Still, the hardware alone shines. The Alienware 18 Area-51 gaming laptop has similar hardware, but taking it to an RTX 5080 will bring you to a $3,800 retail price — and you’re not getting a 4K display. The Razer Blade 18 with an RTX 5080 and a higher-resolution display will cost you $4,100 at retail price. (It’s worth noting that both the Alienware and Razer laptops are on sale on their respective online stores for less than their retail prices at the time I wrapped up this review, but those are marked as limited-time discounts.)

The specs here are good. For the price, though, I just wish it came together better. Other high-end gaming laptops may cost a little bit extra, but the software integration, lighter weight, and higher-end metal designs shine.