Maingear articles

Here's our selection of the most innovative, promising, or downright cool products we saw during this year's massive show. So without further ado here's the best of CES 2016.

Slim gaming notebooks have been getting a lot of attention lately as more efficient technology allows manufacturers to cram high-end parts in a thinner chassis. The Maingear Pulse 15 falls right into this burgeoning segment packing a Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, dual SSDs and a GeForce GTX 870M GPU in its a 0.7" thick body. Its standout feature: a 3K (2880 x 1620) display.

Today we will be looking at the notebook equivalent of the extreme Shift Gaming PC we reviewed a few months back. Known as the Titan 17, our evaluation system consists of an Intel Core i7-990X Extreme Edition processor, a hexa-core desktop CPU operating at 3.46 GHz and two Nvidia GeForce GTX 485M graphics cards.

Other notable hardware includes a 17.3" LED-backlit display running at 1920 x 1080, 6GB of Kingston DDR3-1333 memory, a 120GB Intel 510 solid state drive, a 750GB Western Digital 7200 RPM hard drive, a Blu-ray optical drive, Bigfoot Killer Wireless-N Ultimate network adapter and integrated Bluetooth technology, all running under Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

Most hardcore enthusiasts will tell you it's better to build your own gaming system rather than getting one pre-built. If not for the enjoyment of putting all...