“Maingear’s massively powerful eX-L 17 gaming notebook plows through even the most demanding games like a freight train.”
- Unstoppable gaming power
- Vibrant, 17-inch 1080p display
- Minimal preinstalled clutter
- Loud speakers
- Generous inputs and outputs
- US-based customer support
- Heavy, bulky
- Cheap, irritating rear door
- Glare from glossy screen
- Typical high-performance drone and heat
Introduction
Maingear slid the eX-L 17 onto the market in July with the brazen claim that it was the fastest 17-inch notebook on the market. While we can imagine that someone, somewhere has a 17-inch notebook with a tow-along liquid nitrogen tank that makes that claim bunk, we rest assured that the eX-L 17 represents the absolute bleeding edge of portable speed on the stock side of things. Like the Bugatti Veyron of gaming notebooks, you’ll pay a pretty penny for the privilege of ownership, it may singlehandedly melt a glacier when you fire it up, and 99 percent of the time you’ll never push it to its true limits… but when you do, it’s worth every penny.
Features and Hardware
They say “it’s what’s inside that really counts,” and with gaming notebooks, that’s actually true. Our review model featured Intel’s top-tier Core i7 940XM coupled with ATI’s Mobility Radeon HD 5870 GPU, which sports 1GB of GDDR5
Design
If the monolithic black chassis on the XL-17 looks familiar, that’s because Maingear shares the design with a handful of other manufacturers. Like most boutique outfits without the sales volume to justify tooling for their own designs, Maingear uses generic cases from OEM manufacturers – Clevo in this case – and loads them out itself. Fortunately for those who prefer a bit of character in their hardware, like gamers, Maingear also takes steps to set itself away from the pack with custom laser-etched lids. Besides the four free designs you can choose during the order process, you can also drop an extra $100 to send Maingear your own artwork, which the team will work with you to perfect for the laser-engraving process. The final product stands out as smokey gray lines across the matte black lid with a superfine dotted effect upon closer inspection.
Custom graphics aside, the eX-L actually offers very subdued character, for a gaming notebook. Every inch comes swathed in untextured matte black, with only a thin trace of silver around the edges to set it off. We actually prefer it to the likes of screamy gaming notebooks like Gateway’s FX Series and many of Asus’ Republic of Gamers light shows. If the size doesn’t draw too many stares, it will even fit in just fine at a business meeting, providing you don’t opt to have a half-naked elf and a dragon etched on the lid.
Size and Weight
While its colors and design are unimposing, its posture is not. The 17-inch screen gives the notebook a desk-dominating footprint, and it towers about 1.75 inches tall when closed, though rubber feet boost total height to over 2 inches when seated on a desk. As equipped, our unit also tipped scales at 8.6 pounds, though that’s actually on the reasonable size for a machine with this much power. It’s worth noting, still, that you’ll have a tough time finding a traditional notebook bag that will carry this much ‘book, and the power brick, which is an absolute necessity, will add even more bulk.
Ports and Connectors
As a true desktop replacement, the eX-L 17 offers just about every port and connection you could possible ask for. Unfortunately, some of them end up squirreled away in the least convenient of places.
On the left, you have your phone jack for the modem, CATV jack for TV in, an SD card reader under an unsightly rubber flap that doesn’t sit flush, a FireWire port, a USB port, and a tray-loading Blu-ray drive. On the right, you have a DVI output, eSATA jack for connecting ultra-fast hard drives, another USB port, an ExpressCard/54 slot for add-ons, as well as a headphone jack, microphone jack, line-in jack, and the rather rare digital line-out jack, which could be useful for connecting the eX-L 17 to a high-end sound system.
Here’s the rub: You’ll find the most frequently used jacks, including the power connector, Ethernet port, two extra USB ports and the lone HDMI output, in back, hiding behind behind a flip-down plastic door that feels about as sturdy as the hood on a Matchbox car. We understand the logic behind hiding some ports when they aren’t in use for aesthetic appeal, but putting the most necessary ports – including the power jack – behind a door pretty much means it will always be hanging open. When it is, it looks even worse than a bunch of bare ports would, not to mention threatening to break off every time you lift or readjust the machine. We managed to keep the door intact with ginger handling of our review unit, but take it to a few Mountain-Dew-fueled LAN parties, and we wouldn’t give it past a few months. Our advice if you buy one: Break it off right out of the box and spare yourself the anxiety.
Performance
All petty misgivings about this Maingear’s annoying rear door evaporate in a flash when you open your favorite games. They’ve never looked this good away from an air-sucking desktop rig.
The eX-L 17 made short work of all our usual fodder for taxing gaming rigs. MotoGP08 looked nearly photorealistic with every detail setting on high, and the eX-L 17 still managed to peg the maximum allowed framerate of 60. Even after enabling 4x anti-aliasing, it took a screen full of racers and scenery to get the framerate to drop below 50, if for only a slight moment.
We moved, instead, on to BioShock. Like MotoGP08, the surreal sci-fi shooter gave the eX-L17 no challenge to speak of. Framerates routinely hovered in the upper 50s, and only the most cinematic effects, like a game opening-shot of a blaze on ultra-realistic water, were able to get it to even dip into the 40s.
Naturally, it was time for Crysis. Even starting out with all detail settings on high and the resolution at 1080p, the eX-L 17 pumped out a consistent 32 frames per second – right where it needs to be for silky smooth, uninterrupted playability – and a feat that not many
On the desktop, the eX-L tosses
Benchmarks don’t nearly tell the real performance of this machine. It scored 12,387 PCMarks and 8,881 3DMarks in respective tests from Futuremark. While neither is anything to whine about, its in-game performance tells far more. The eX-L 17 will play whatever game you want, however you want to play it.
Keyboard and Touchpad
As you might expect on a 17-inch notebook, the eX-L 17 boasts a keyboard that’s plenty wide, with full-sized arrow keys, a number pad, and all the oddities that usually get buried on notebooks, like insert, print screen and even a dedicated asterisk key. It feels solid all around and the Chiclet-style keys deliver a firm feedback, too.
While the touchpad isn’t as big as is it could be — MacBooks still have the size advantage — we liked the smooth matte finish and firm right- and left-click buttons, which come in handy should you actually have to use the touchpad for gaming, in place of a wireless mouse.
Display
Like most
The payback for all the glare in the bright light turns out to be one of the most vibrant, rich-looking laptop displays you’ll ever lay eyes on in the dark, with phenomenally dark blacks that ratchet up the atmosphere in games like BioShock. Keep it in the dark like a vampire, and it’s an absolute stunner.
Fortunately, thanks to its 1080p native resolution, built-in Blu-ray drive, and preinstalled copy of CyberLink it’s also a perfect portable cinema – just don’t plan on enjoying it anywhere away from an outlet.
Sound
The size of the eX-L17 does let it cough out slightly better sound than your average laptop, but it still carries the tell-tale tininess of all laptop speakers. Fortunately, they stay composed even at full volume, without becoming shrill, making dialogue come across clearly in movies and important sounds from games, like footsteps.
Battery Life
Maingear doesn’t even publish battery life estimates for the eX-L17, which should be some indication how abysmal it really is. Even with an expectation of poor performance we had to laugh at just how poorly the eX-L17 really does away sans its umbilical cord to the wall.
Without flexing its considerable muscle – just taking some notes in Google Docs with Wi-Fi on and brightness to full – we got just over 40 minutes from it. Push down the pedal a bit with Crysis, and you had better be scrambling to that next outlet: We got just about 10 minutes before our game abruptly turned to a black screen.
In short, it’s more like a UPS backup system to keep things from crashing when the cord gets yanked from the wall, than a real option for portability. Anyone looking for a gaming rig should know what they’re getting into, but be aware that this machine won’t even pretend to play business machine away from the wall. That power cord might as well be a chain.
Heat and Noise
Like all high-power gaming machines, the eX-L17 has to move more than a little air to keep the copper metropolis inside cool and thousands of dollars of silicon from going up in smoke. Three circular grilles on the bottom of the laptop pull cool air in from below, while hot exhaust spills out of two rectangular grilles in the rear. Even at idle, the back vents will warm the knees a bit, and after a bit of Crysis, it’s more like a flamethrower back there. Between that and the possibility of blocking airflow to the bottom vents with your legs, gaming from a desktop is definitely recommended.
Obviously, the fans needed to churn up all this air don’t run in complete silence, but we commend how consistently they run. At idle, they run quietly all the time, and under load, they run hard all the time. We much prefer this potential overkill to fans that insist on spinning up and down all the time, which grates at the nerves more than a constant buzzing sound.
Software
In the true style of most high-end boutique manufacturers, Maingear keeps the software load on the eX-L 17 light, but comfortable. You’ll find only three shortcuts on the desktop, and the few bits of software Maingear has chosen to install on here for you will be welcome. CyberLink PowerDVD, for instance, will let you play Blu-ray movies and DVDs right out of the box, and BisonCam acts as a lightweight application to test out the webcam before you hit Skype.
Conclusion
While the $4,746 price tag on our eX-L 17 might strike even seasoned gamers as a bit steep, Maingear offers different variations with the same brutish video card all the way down to $1,899. For the amount of horsepower you (still) get on tap, that’s reasonable, but still more than comparable systems from other custom builders. AVADirect, for instance, sells a similar base configuration in the same case for $1,641, and the iBuyPower version starts at $1,539. That said, if you’re looking at laying out this much money, cushy Maingear extras like its “Angelic Service” warranty, which puts you on the phone with an actual engineer here in the United States if you run into issues, and a guarantee that your system won’t have any dead pixels, may justify the extra expense. Since systems built to the same specs would share many of the same pros and cons below, gamers looking for a machine of this caliber should compare the extras between vendors to decide which offers the best value for their dollar. Overall, the Maingear eX-L 17 is an excellent machine that dominates the competition.
Highs:
- Unstoppable gaming power
- Vibrant, 17-inch 1080p display
- Minimal preinstalled clutter
- Loud speakers
- Generous inputs and outputs
- US-based customer support
Lows:
- Heavy, bulky
- Cheap, irritating rear door
- Glare from glossy screen
- Typical high-performance drone and heat
