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How would you change Maingear's Pulse 11?
Gaming laptops are tricky beasts to review, since you're naturally sacrificing those normally cherished qualities (battery life, portability) for pure performance. When your humble narrator reviewed Maingear's Pulse 11, we found that its hulking insides were only let down by a slightly awkward keyboard and a weak trackpad. In fact, as an eleven-inch premium gaming machine, we were staggered, and as long as you bring along some peripherals, we had no reservations about recommending one. Then again, we didn't live with one of these for the better part of six months. As such, we need to turn to our readers and ask, if you own one of these, what do you love, what do you loathe and most importantly, what would you change?
Maingear's 11.6-inch Pulse 11 gaming laptop starts shipping
Alienware's M11x may be history, but as these things tend to go, there's always someone willing to carry the torch. Maingear's recently-introduced 11.6-inch Pulse 11 just so happens to be that rig in this here story, and those that've been waiting won't have to twiddle their thumbs any longer. The company is shipping the bantam gaming rig in the US starting this week, offering a Core i7 CPU (or a Core i5, if you'd rather), NVIDIA's Optimus graphics switching (tied to a GeForce GT 650 'Kepler' GPU), 11.6-inch LED-backlit panel (1366 x 768), up to 16GB of DDR3 memory, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, a 9-in-1 card reader, six-cell Li-ion battery and plenty of ports. It's starting at just $999, but speccing it out all proper like will send the asking price well north of that. (But trust us, it's worth it.)
Maingear's Pulse 11-inch gaming laptop has designs on M11x mourners
Gamers who'd been eyeing up an Alienware M11x may have been rightly irked when the 11-inch form factor was yanked off shelves. Fortunately, Maingear is stepping in with a laptop that slots an Ivy Bridge CPU into equally compact hardware. The Pulse 11 has an 11.6-inch 1366 x 768 LED-backlit display, supports up to 16GB of dual-channel DDR3 RAM while packing HDMI-out 1.4a, USB 3.0 and THX TruStudio Pro sound. Graphics-wise, there's an NVIDIA GeForce GT650M with 2GB RAM for fragging your enemies, and an Intel GMA HD GPU for fragging your spreadsheets. The hardware will begin shipping on June 3rd, with prices starting from $1,099 for a Core i5, 8GB RAM and a 320GB HDD.
