Laptops for PC gaming have typically been 17-inch and even 18-inch systems, designed to stay put on a desktop for most of their working life. Occasionally, we'd see an outlier such as the Alienware M11x (yes, Maingear also made an 11-inch gaming laptop), but those systems rarely satisfied as either gaming rigs or ultraportable PCs.
Maingear Pulse 14
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
But an unexpected trend is picking up in 2013. We're seeing more and more midsize and smaller gaming laptops, with screens in the 13- to 14-inch range. And rather than the handful of examples from previous years, which were largely mainstream laptops with a midlevel GPU crammed in, these new systems are built from the ground up for gaming.
The Maingear Pulse 14 is a highly customizable 14-inch gaming laptop that joins the Alienware 14, Origin EON13-S, and 14-inch Razer Blade. Our review sample cost $1,919 (including an external optical drive and mouse), with a starting price of $1,255. That puts it generally in line with those other midsize gaming laptops, and although it's impossible to configure each of these with exactly the same set of components, you can get fairly close.
The Pulse 14 has a few things going for it. It's pleasingly slim and offers a very nicely done series of custom-painted lids with automotive paint (as a $99 upgrade). The same two main components in our more expensive system -- an Intel Core i7 4702QM CPU and Nvidia GeForce GTX 760M -- are also included in the entry-level $1,255 version. Among the expensive add-ons in our system is a very nice double hard drive -- twin 128GB SSDs in a RAID configuration, plus a full 1TB HDD.
But, the Pulse 14 suffers from the same near-fatal flaw that sunk the otherwise impressive Razer Blade 14: a substandard display despite the premium price. This 14-inch screen has a 1,600x900-pixel native resolution, and the image quality is decent, but not great. I wouldn't be happy with this display on a laptop that cost $1,000, much less nearly twice that.
Also in the negative column, like nearly every gaming laptop from a boutique PC maker, the Pulse 14 is built on top of a generic off-the-shelf third-party laptop body. These outer shells are never built with gaming in mind, and you end up with high-end parts inside a chassis that has a very plastic feel, with a clacky, uneven keyboard, small touch pad, and a lack of multimedia controls.
I ended up using the Pulse 14 most often connected to an external monitor via HDMI, with a separate mouse and keyboard. Set up like that, it worked very nicely for high-end mainstream gaming, but as a standalone gaming laptop, you'll find the screen and body frustrating.