Maingear Debuts New Pulse 15 Gaming Laptop

Maingear announced a new version of its Pulse 15 gaming laptop.

The new Maingear Pulse 15 features a thin 0.86” profile and weighs only 4.4lbs., making it the lightest gaming laptop the company has ever offered. The 15.6” display’s thin bezels makes the Pulse more like a 14-inch notebook, and the 1920 x 1080 matte screen has a 60Hz refresh rate by default. Maingear said that 1080p 120Hz panels would be available as an option in July.

Another first for Maingear’s laptop lineup are the Pulse’s mechanical keyboard switches, which sport individually addressable RGB lights. We asked the company about the brand and type of the switches, and it said it would get back to us with more information. However, due to the incredibly thin profile, we theorize these could be the Kaihua scissor-switch mechanical keys we saw debut last year at Computex.

Under the hood, Maingear packs an Intel Core i7-8750H processor and GeForce GTX 1060 6GB graphics, in addition to up to 32GB DDR4 SODIMM memory and a 2TB Samsung 970 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD. The 150W AC power adapter feeds the Pulse 15 enough juice for the components, and a 3-cell 46.74WH battery should provide a decent untethered runtime with light workloads.

For USB connectivity, there’s a USB 3.1 (Gen 2) Type-C port, in addition to two USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0 ports. The Pulse 15 is VR ready and has plenty of display outputs to connect an HMD, including an HDMI 2.0 and two mini-DisplayPort 1.4 interfaces. There’s also a 4-in-1 card reader, and you can use a gigabit Ethernet plug or an Intel dual-band Wireless-AC 9560 802.11ac WiFi chip to connect to the Internet.

The new Maingear Pulse 15 gaming laptop is available now from the company’s website, starting at $1,399. You can also customize the Pulse 15 with automotive paint or MARC II finishes.