Maingear Super 16 review: The right kind of power, but not the complete package

Price When Reviewed

$2,758

Best Prices Today: Maingear Super 16

Maingear might not be the household brand that big OEMs like Asus and Lenovo are, but it brings solid chops when it comes to making a gaming computer. The Maingear Super 16 is a clear example of this. It packs in powerful hardware and comes with an exciting list of specs like a 300Hz display. 

The Maingear Super 16 may not quite have the looks of some of its rivals as it comes with a chassis made by Clevo, not Maingear itself. Still, the brand does solid work within that constraint. And it even manages to maintain a fairly competitive price. But where value counts, it may come down to some of the intangibles.

After all, the Super 16 didn’t blow away the competition in benchmarks, outshine them in design, or cleanly undercut them in price. The cleaner software setup might help, and the promise of in-house, human customer support from a small company could be beneficial for users who’ve found themselves in need of tech support. But if you’re looking to get more performance for every dollar you spend, the Maingear Super 16 may have a hard time earning that money. 

Maingear Super 16: Specs and features

• CPU: Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX
• Memory: 32GB DDR5-5600
• Graphics/GPU: Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti 140W
• Display: 16-inch 2560×1600 300Hz IPS, Matte, G-Sync
• Storage: 2TB PCIe Gen 5 SSD Samsung 9100 Pro
• Webcam: 5MP + IR
• Connectivity: 2x Thunderbolt 4 with 100W Power Delivery, 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x microSD card reader, 1x 3.5mm combo audio, 1 x Ethernet
• Networking: WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Biometrics: Windows Hello facial recognition
• Battery capacity: 78 watt-hours
• Dimensions: 14.02 x 10.75 x 1.18 inches
• Weight: 5.04 pounds
• MSRP: $2,758 as-tested ($2,549 base)

The Maingear Super 16 essentially comes in a single pre-built configuration with the above specifications. Maingear offers a “Boost” specification that doubles the storage and memory, but the core components remain the same. Maingear also offers a custom configuration with options for 64GB or 96GB of memory and additional SSD choices. The pre-built model ships with a Samsung 990 Pro PCIe Gen 4 SSDs, but our review unit came equipped with a Samsung 9100 Pro PCIe Gen 5 SSD. This drive is available in the custom configurations. The custom configuration also allows for the selection of secondary and tertiary SSDs. 

The Maingear Super 16 is a potent gaming laptop that can run with some of the best that big OEMs have to offer.

Maingear Super 16: Design and build quality

The Maingear Super 16 doesn’t have the most stunning design. It feels like hardware made simply to house the latest components without much emphasis on the laptop’s design itself. It simply fades from the picture. The all-black color scheme helps with that fading, though there’s a sparkle to the paint job that gives it a little luster almost at odds with the blandness of the design otherwise. 

The chassis is a combination of hard angles, with nary a smooth curve in sight. That leaves the front lip of the laptop angular as well, which can dig into the wrists a little while using the sizable machine. To house a 16-inch display, the Maingear Super 16 doesn’t get to be small, but its front-to-back length is considerable at almost 11 inches. This makes it harder to fit into bags and a bit of a stretch to reach the keyboard. There’s considerable bulk, too.

This isn’t a thin-and-light gaming laptop like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16, either. Instead it’s almost 1.2 inches thick and weighs five pounds. The charging brick, though not unusually large, adds another 1.5 pounds to the mix.

Like the looks, the build of Maingear Super 16 isn’t too exciting. It does get a metal display lid with a Maingear logo stamped on it, but the rest of the system is plastic — rough ABS around the display and smooth polycarbonate for the lower deck. The result is a little cheaper feeling and looking than laptops incorporating metal into the lower frame. The build isn’t overly flexible, but there’s a bit of wiggle and bending here and there that doesn’t make it feel quite as tank-like as it looks. 

The laptop sits on large rubber feet that do a great job of keeping it in place while also ensuring the underside has access to fresh air. All the air is exhausted through the large grilles on the sides of the laptop and thinner grilles that extend out of the back of the system. Curiously, I found the laptop vibrating while gaming at one point, seemingly as a result of some sort of resonance from the fans. I could hear the vibration and feel it with my hands on the keyboard. It stopped after a minute or so, but it was an unusual incident. 

The one splash of style that the Maingear Super 16 gets is an LED light bar that runs along the back edge of the laptop, where you simply can’t see it while you’re actually using the laptop (though other people can). 

Maingear Super 16: Keyboard, trackpad

The keyboard is a mixed bag. It offers a long travel and an almost clicky feel that gives it a poppy experience. But that’s offset by poorly and unevenly stabilized keycaps with no contour to help guide my fingers to the center. I find myself often rolling off the edges, landing on the edge of neighboring keys, and even catching on neighboring keys when I try to shift my fingers after pressing a key.

The result is that I simply can’t get up to speed without introducing significant errors into my typing. I was able to get to typing speeds between 100 and 110 words per minute in Monkeytype, but usually with accuracy below 95 percent, leaving plenty of typos to clean up. 

The keyboard includes full-size arrow keys and a slightly narrow number pad. Unfortunately, the arrow keys eat into the space of the main keyboard and number pad alike. This can make use of the right shift key and the zero key on the number pad a bit fraught. The backlighting of the keyboard is quite effective, fully illuminating the legends and supporting various effects. It only comes in three zones though, so no per-key customization. 

There’s little to say about the trackpad. It’s small for a 16-inch laptop, but not annoyingly so. There’s space to swipe around, perform multi-finger gestures, and generally get the job done. The surface isn’t the smoothest, but is passable. The physical click is a bit soft and unsatisfying. At least palm rejection was reliable. 

Maingear Super 16: Display, audio

The Maingear Super 16’s display is great, but doesn’t quite hit the bar for superb. It’s a bright, easy-to-see IPS panel that hit 547 nits in our testing, and thanks to its matte finish, it’s easily viewable even at far dimmer levels.

As an IPS panel, its contrast is naturally a little less impressive, only hitting 1260:1, and it doesn’t boast the widest color gamut with just 84 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. It is sharp and fast, though, delivering 2560×1600 pixels at up to 300Hz with variable refresh support via G-Sync.

Playing games on this display, the speed was admirable. But with alternatives out there offering 240Hz OLED panels that have faster pixel response times, wider color gamut, and stronger contrast, the extra 60Hz Maingear provides doesn’t feel worth all that much.

The speakers aren’t especially impressive. They’re a pair of down-firing speakers positioned near the front of the laptop. They pack a decent punch, helping them play over the sound of the fans well enough, and they don’t sound boxed in or tinny. But they also don’t stand out for a wide soundstage or exceptional depth either. 

Maingear Super 16: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

The 5MP webcam on the Maingear Super 16 is a capable one. It captures sharp visuals, albeit with some noise in dimmer rooms. It offers fairly natural lighting and coloring, too, though can struggle to expose properly with strong backlighting. It also supports Windows Hello facial recognition for quick logins. And for privacy, it has a physical shutter to cover up the lens. 

The mics are fairly sensitive, capturing my voice easily with plenty of detail. But the side effect of this is that they also pick up a lot of room noise. You won’t get away with typing on the laptop or clicking around while you’re on a call with the built-in mic.

Maingear Super 16: Connectivity

The Maingear Super 16 isn’t a connectivity beast like it could have been as a 16-inch laptop with plenty of space for ports, but it’s not a disappointment either. It features a pretty typical selection of ports for a gaming laptop of its size. You’ll find a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports on the right side of the laptop, both of which can support 100W power delivery, though not while gaming. There’s a microSD card slot on the right edge as well. A 10Gbps USB-A port is available on either side of the laptop and a 3.5mm headset jack on the left.

The rear edge of the laptop squeezes in a few extra ports with an HDMI 2.1, 2.5Gb Ethernet, and a dedicated DC power jack. Because the Maingear Super 16 has large exhaust vents on the sides, all of the side ports are pushed toward the front of the laptop, which can make for a slightly messier desk look and wired devices can get in the way of a mouse. 

Wireless connectivity is a strong point with the laptop supporting Wi-Fi 7 through an Intel Wi-Fi 7 BE200 card, which supports tri-band Wi-Fi 7, giving you access to that less-congested 6Ghz band. The card also supports Bluetooth 5.4. 

Maingear Super 16: Performance

Thicker laptops tend to have a bit of extra potential where performance comes in, and the Maingear Super 16 shows that off. It offers exceptionally strong performance in the holistic PCMark 10 benchmark, which analyzes systems’ performance in a variety of office tasks. 

As a potent gaming machine, office tasks are light work for it. Note, however, that because this test system has an upgraded SSD that the pre-built model doesn’t include, its score is likely a little higher. Even with that SSD, the Maingear Super 16 actually trailed the pack in this gaming laptop lineup for the App Startup sub-test in PCMark 10, which depends on fast storage. 

The Maingear Super 16’s Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU performs quite well, though isn’t a class-leader and leaves some performance on the table. Its single-core performance lags a bit behind its competition here. AMD leads the way with the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D in the Asus ROG Strix G16 with strong single-core and multi-core performance. Maingear’s option sits between the Acer Predator Helios NEO 16S AI and Alienware 16X Aurora, both of which use the same CPU but with different levels of performance, showing what a considerable difference cooling and power delivery can make. 

Part of the issue with the Maingear Super 16’s performance is that it comes slightly hamstrung by default. Checking out the performance in the demanding 3DMark Port Royal test, we can see that the Maingear Super 16 goes from second-place in its default plan straight to first by swapping over to its higher performance mode, getting over a 10 percent boost in speed.

While plenty of gaming computers are happy to automatically kick into higher performance modes when it’s called for, the Maingear Super 16 sticks to a lower-power plan unless manually adjusted. That manual adjustment requires opening up Maingear’s software, too, as there’s no one-click button on the keyboard to enable it. Part of this is to comply with California law, but Maingear explained the reliance on manual power adjustments was because they didn’t want users dealing with noisy fans every time they plugged their laptop in.

I’m not quite convinced by that excuse, as plenty of other laptops don’t immediately ramp up the fans just because they’re in a higher power mode but instead do so when in that mode and running a heavy workload. Besides, the Maingear Super 16’s fans make plenty of noise when they’re working hard even in the default power plan.

In gaming, the Maingear Super 16 shows what a big difference power supply allowances can make with its 140-watt GPU. It still trails the Asus ROG Strix G16, which offers the faster CPU and has a 140-watt GPU, but next to the other two RTX 5070 Ti-equipped, it gets a nice little performance advantage. The system is very capable at 1080p. 

The Maingear Super 16 can even handle quite demanding games well. Metro Exodus at its Extreme settings really hammers PCs even at 1080p, but the Maingear Super 16 is able to maintain a solid 61fps average. Again, its higher-power GPU helps it step away from lower-performance options. 

Cyberpunk 2077 shows similar results with the Maingear Super 16 again leading its 115-watt rivals but falling short of the Asus ROG Strix G16. That consistent performance deficit puts it into a bit of a tough spot as the Maingear Super 16 and ROG Strix G16 are very similar laptops in terms of size, weight, and construction but Asus opts for an excellent OLED display.

Though we did see the Maingear Super 16 pull back a performance lead by switching to its “Performance” mode in one benchmark, that wasn’t a consistent method to shift benchmarks in its favor. It may have helped it win in 3DMark’s Port Royal test, but it still trailed the Asus system in Steel Nomad. And where gaming is considered, I’ve seen recent AMD hardware tend to deliver an advantage over recent Intel hardware in actual game benchmarks that wasn’t demonstrated in synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark’s. Besides, all of these laptops have their own ways of dialing performance to the max in turn, to help them regain any ground they might lose from the Maingear system dialing up its own performance. 

Still, the Maingear Super 16 is a strong-performing laptop. And even with its default power plan, it has plenty to offer. I played an hour or two of Stellar Blade at the laptop’s native resolution and tapping into DLSS Balanced to make the most of what the hardware had to offer, and I enjoyed consistent framerates between 180 and 200fps and a responsive enough experience to face three bosses and prevail on the first try each time. While the fans were a little noisy, they weren’t shrill or obnoxious, and the whole system remained comfortable to the touch during this gaming session. 

Maingear Super 16: Battery life

Some gaming laptops have seen their battery life improve considerably in recent years, and that’s often aided along by solid software management of the internal hardware. If a gaming laptop is smart about disabling the GPU when it’s not needed, it can last much longer. Unfortunately, the Maingear Super 16 neither includes the largest battery it could nor makes particularly efficient use of the capacity it does have. In our offline video playback test, the system just scraped past a three-hour runtime. Its competition is offering almost double that on average, and turning to a system like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 shows how much higher it can go with smart hardware management (and lower-power components).  

The real-world battery life can vary quite a bit. Leaving GPU management to the device, it can leverage the RTX 5070 Ti for a lot of little things that might not seem like they need the GPU and hurt the battery life in the process. The display’s matte finish lets it provide serviceable visuals at lower brightness levels than we used in our test, though, so it’s also possible to end up with more conservative battery use. Outside of strong direct lighting, I was comfortably able to use the laptop at its lowest brightness setting, and with the GPU fully disabled, I saw runtime on track for about five to 5.5 hours. That said, that is just about a best-case scenario. 

Maingear Super 16: Conclusion

The Maingear Super 16 is a potent gaming laptop that can run with some of the best that big OEMs have to offer. Its design is a little less exciting, and it doesn’t bring smart software to the table to help manage power states and easily make the most of its hardware, though. This can make it hard for it to keep up with some of its rivals. And at $2,758, it’s not marking a terribly impressive value either.

The dominant Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 has an RTX 5070 Ti configuration for less at the time of writing. Asus’s very competitive ROG Strix G16 was also available for considerably less at the time of writing. And for more impressive hardware, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 can be fitted with an RTX 5070 Ti as well for a competitive price while offering a more stunning, thin-and-light design that’s a pound lighter and almost half as thick while also fitting a bigger battery and running longer on it. The Maingear Super 16 is decent, but just doesn’t stand out.

Best Prices Today: Maingear Super 16

Author: Mark Knapp, Contributor, PCWorld