Maingear ML-16 Gaming Laptop Review: Premium, Powerful, Customizable

Maingear ML-16 Gaming Laptop Thermal And Acoustic Performance

The fans on-board the cooling system of the Maingear ML-16 do spin up to noticeable levels under load, though even in Performance mode, the system remains relatively mild-mannered. Here we've fired-up the DX12 with ray tracing-infused 3DMark Speed Way benchmark, and looped it for a solid 30 mins to saturate the machine's thermal solution. Then we took to it with a sound pressure meter and an infrared thermal gun.


In regards to how much heat the ML-16 laptop produces under a full load, it does get a bit toasty. If someone were resting it on their legs, it could be a bit uncomfortable, but should be bearable. When under a normal load, however, the laptop remains relatively cool.

The above images also show how much of a difference in sound produced by the cooling fans when under a typical work load, and a heavy load such as when playing a GPU-intensive game. While the noise from the fans is quite noticeable under a heavy load, it shouldn't be too offensive. Make no mistake though, this is a gaming laptop and you can expect a bit of racket from its cooling system. Bring those headphones with, if you want better acoustics during gameplay.

Maingear ML-16 Gaming Laptop Battery Life

To see how well the Maingear ML-16 gaming laptop fared in terms of battery life, we fired up PCMark 10’s Video test, which runs a 1080p video playback workload in a continuous loop with the Windows 11 Movies and TV player, with the display lit up the entire time, until the battery is exhausted. In all tests, Windows Quiet Hours / Focus Assist has been enabled, and the displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. Wi-Fi is left enabled though, which we feel is a common use case.


We also fired up PCMark 10's Gaming Battery Test to see how the machine's endurance faired with a heavier workload on its CPU and discrete GPU.

Battery life with the Maingear ML-16 laptop is about what one would expect with a gaming laptop. When using it for everyday tasks, such as watching videos, working on Word documents, and browsing the web, users can expect around 4 hours of use before running out of juice. When it comes to gaming, however, expect that to be cut in half, with around 1.5-2 hours of gameplay.

Maingear ML-16 Gaming Laptop: Final Thoughts And Our Review Conclusion

The Maingear ML-16 gaming laptop was a delight to use, and there is plenty to like about it. For one, it is very well built, and feels like a premium machine. It also comes with a vibrant 16-inch QHD IPS display, which delivers crisp images at 2560x1600 resolution. When it comes to sound, the built-in speakers delivered acceptable though not outstanding quality audio. Battery life was about what one would expect with any gaming laptop with these specs as well. On the performance side, this machine delivered the goods, with its GeForce RTX 4070 pushing the pixels for gaming and its reasonably robust Core Ultra 7 CPU handling productivity tasks and standard laptop use cases well. 

In addition, Maingear's custom ML-16 gaming laptop will arrive with no bloatware, which means not having to sift through the apps section after booting up to find all the annoying software that often accompanies retail machines like this. Another plus from ordering an ML-16 laptop is the ability to customize the laptop lid with custom graphics, ultimately making it feel more unique to the user. And then there is the great customer service that comes along with a Maingear product (at least in our experience thus far).

There are few things that some might find as negatives, but are more about nit picking than anything else. One is the fact there is only one option for a CPU, the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. If an i9 is needed or desired, customers will have to look at the ML-17 series of gaming laptops for that. A couple of other possible sticking points are the lack of RGB options for the keyboard, and the lack of a touchscreen, that latter of which is pretty common in this class of notebooks.

At the end of the day, Maingear's ML-16 gaming laptop is a solid choice for any gamer. It is currently available on Maingear.com with a starting price of $1,677 with an NVIDIA RTX 4060 GPU, while our RTX 4070 config runs for $1,977. The Maingear ML-16 is not cheap but you do get what you pay for in performance, build quality and a great display.