MAINGEAR ELEMENT
A new gaming laptop enters the ring, and it can box all 10 rounds
WITH SO MANY BRANDS, such as Asus and MSI, dominating the gaming laptop landscape, it’s exciting when an unfamiliar name comes along. Granted, Maingear isn’t a no-name company— the boutique system builder has been around since 2002—but it’s entering the notebook arena for the first time with its Element and Vector laptops.
The model tested here is the retail version of the Element, which is slim, sleek, and weighs barely over four pounds, with a bezel of just 0.25 inches. The tenkeyless keyboard also helps give the Element its slim dimensions. The keys themselves are very square and packed tight, leaving more room at the bottom for a larger than average touchpad—but they also respond quickly, thanks to the lightweight, optical silent switches. For “silent” switches, though, they are surprisingly loud and clicky.
Also, it took this reviewer a while to adapt to the compressed keyboard layout, being used to the spaced-out keys of something like the Lenovo Legion Y740. Several hours of typing on the Element were required to get accustomed to the keyboard, and it might be a little too compact for anyone with large hands.
Specs-wise, the Element comes with a ninth-gen Intel Core i7-9750H processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q graphics card, 32GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, and, while many other high-end gaming laptops opt for less than 1TB of primary SSD storage (usually with a secondary HDD), the Element has a 2TB NVMe SSD. This model also features Wi-Fi 6, one Thunderbolt 3/USB Type C port, three USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, an HDMI 2.0 port, a current-standard Ethernet port, separate mic and audio jacks, and an SD drive—plus a glass touchpad. It checks all the boxes and then some.
Given the total list of specifications, it’s not surprising that the Element is priced at $2,300, which is in line with competing notebooks. It would be more competitive if it ditched the Max-Q graphics card, but that would come at the expense of the notebook’s slim, compact design. Switching over from balanced to redline gaming mode only gave each game a 5fps boost—and spun the fans so fast the Element could have been the first laptop to achieve flight. That small boost isn’t worth potentially wearing out the fans faster or overheating the system, but even while pushing each game to its max, the laptop stayed reasonably cool.
On ultra graphics, Division2 cranked out 65fps, MetroExodus hit 46fps (ray tracing off), and Total War: Warhammer II managed between 67fps and 75fps. Comparing other benchmarks to another of our reviews, MSI’s GS75 Stealth, the synthetic benchmarks are not terribly different. The GS75 scored 15,873 in 3DMark Fire Strike, while Maingear’s Element scored 15,344—completely in line with what you’d expect when comparing the RTX 2070 Max-Q to the RTX 2080 Max-Q. While this notebook is capable of handling demanding games, it comes at a slight cost to the frame rate. Dropping the graphics quality to high or medium pushes MetroExodus into the 60fps range, for instance.
As for the battery life, the Element has many other laptops beat when it comes to normal productivity and streaming video. At just over eight hours of life, you won’t need to plug this laptop in until the end of the workday. When it comes to gaming, though, the Element lasted just over two hours—enough time for a few quick matches in Overwatch.
Put the Element next to the usual names from the best gaming laptop lists, and you’ve got something just as well designed, reliable, and competitively priced. It checks all the boxes one would expect from a gaming laptop of this caliber. We’ve been impressed by the quality of Maingear’s desktops in the past, and can now say the same thing about one of its laptops. If you prefer your laptops small, light, and thin, give this one more than a passing glance. –JOANNA NELIUS
Maingear Element
ELEMENTAL Sleek design; competitively priced; runs decently cool.
MENTAL Max-Q graphics card; loud fans; no 1440p or 4K option.
$2,300, www.maingear.com