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

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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

Maingear Ultima 18: Design and build quality

IDG / Chris Hoffman

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.

IDG / Chris Hoffman

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

IDG / Chris Hoffman

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

IDG / Chris Hoffman

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 lap