Maingear Ultima 18 review: A "no compromise" powerhouse
Enter the Ultima 18. This year, Maingear opted for a massive, 18-inch desktop replacement laptop. The Ultima 18 features an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 or RTX 5090 GPU, up to 128GB of RAM, up to 4TB of SSD storage, and an 18-inch, 4K IPS display rated to 400 nits of brightness and 100% coverage on the DCI-P3 color gamut. If the ML-16 was a study in portability, the Ultimate 18 is a pure example of maximalism at work. But Maingear didn't just stop with great specs. The Ultima 18 also features a robust sound system, sturdy build quality, and Maingear's award-winning customer service.
Maingear Ultima 18: Pricing and availability
Just how much should you save?
The Ultima 18 starts at $3,599, which gets you an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, 32GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD storage, and an 18-inch, 4K IPS display. You can upgrade the Ultima's GPU to an RTX 5090 version for $4,299. Either configuration can be boosted to include 64GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD for an additional $300.
You can customize an Ultima 18 to feature 128GB of RAM and extra SSD storage, up to a maximum of 28TB, if you utilize every bit of the Ultima 18's four PCIe SSD slots. That absolutely ludicrous build retails for $8,200. Our review configuration features an RTX 5080, 32GB of RAM, and 4TB of SSD storage, which is priced at $4,054.
Maingear Ultima 18: Design
A large and in-charge gaming machine.
Calling the Maingear Ultima 18 "chunky" is perhaps underselling the sheer scale of this 18-inch beast. The Ultima 18 weighs 8.8 pounds and measures 1.1~1.4 x 15.83~16.14 x 12.56 inches. The Ultima is chunkier at the back in both width and depth, thanks to the fan hub on the back hinge. While this powerful cooling system is ideal for overclocking the Ultima 18's performance, it does make the laptop even less portable than your average 18-inch gaming laptop.
Rather than focus on portability this time around, Maingear opted instead to go for a high-contrast black and white design with the Maingear logo on the top panel lid, per-key RGB on the full-size chiclet keyboard, and extra RGB lights under the fins on the rear fan hub. The keyboard deck itself is rather understated, with a clean deck and oversized, low-friction touchpad. The biggest weakness here is the keyboard. Chiclet keyboards are just not my favorite, as they feel a bit mushy under your fingers rather than offering a truly satisfying activation.
The Ultima's design is about as extra as a gaming laptop can get without burning out your retinas with excessive RGB. Overall, it's far from sleek or slim, but it's visually interesting and solidly built.
The ultimate viewing experience
I'm a sucker for a color-accurate 4K display.
The 18-inch display on the Ultima is absolutely massive for a laptop and supports resolutions up to 4K (3840 x 2400), allowing you to take full advantage of every pixel for additional screen space and greater graphic detail while gaming or working on 3D designs. The display is rated to 400 nits, which is more than enough to handle any glare from your apartment lighting while ensuring the right balance of brightness and crisp detail.
Streamlined software
Revamped user controls in a few convenient apps.
Not only can you adjust your laptop's CPU and GPU overclock and fan speed from the main System Monitor page, you can also control the power profile, set the keyboard and fan hub lighting, create custom keyboard and mouse macros, and adjust the Ultima 18's charge rate.
The Creative App controls the Ultima's robust built-in sound system, while the Nvidia App offers access to Nvidia's suite of software tools, from driver updates to optimized game settings.
Other than that, you get to skip out on a ton of bloatware. You just have some support software installed for the various components, like Intel's Killer software suite, and a few essential Windows applications like Edge and the Microsoft Store, but the Ultima doesn't ship with a lot of unnecessary bloatware bogging down your SSD capacity.
Right to repair
Just how far can you go on your own?
Maingear offers lifetime support for any PCs or laptops purchased from the company. But the warranty is only valid for a year. So if your problem is software-based, you should absolutely hop on the support page and seek assistance. If you've run out of your warranty and think you can repair the Ultima 18 on your own, or you want to upgrade your RAM or use one of the spare PCIe storage slots, I do have some good news.
If you take off the bottom panel of the Ultima 18, you can easily access the extra RAM and PCIe storage slots. The large 98Whr battery is also in easy reach from the bottom of the chassis, so swapping out your battery won't be too difficult either. You just want to be careful of the latches keeping the bottom panel in place as you remove and reinstall the cover.
"No compromise" performance
The Ultima Weapon of gaming laptops.
Maingear chose quality components to fit in that chunky Clevo chassis, and it shows in the Ultima's blistering performance in general productivity, gaming, and 3D design tasks. I couldn't find a thing to throw at the Ultima 18 that it couldn't handle. My day-to-day work was a breeze, and even my most poorly optimized games ran smoothly with the right settings. I did notice a performance drop when operating on battery power, but that tends to be the case with discrete graphics cards in general, though Nvidia's Battery Boost technology has cut the performance drop pretty significantly over previous generations. It's still not going to get you great battery life, but I wouldn't ever expect the Ultima 18 to last long on battery life, considering.
But synthetic benchmarks only tell you so much. What about actual gaming performance?
I ran the Ultima 18 through a series of game benchmarks. A few to test pure silicon performance, and a few with both DLSS enabled and disabled, to see how much of a performance uplift you can get just with Nvidia's super sampling tech. I also ran Cyberpunk 2077 with Nvidia's new 4x frame generation to get a feel of just how much better performance gets if you're willing to accept the software boost.
I stuck to Ultra settings for all of these benchmarks to get an idea of just how well the Ultima performs when pushed to its limits. But it is worth noting that I didn't overclock the GPU prior to these benchmarks. So this is the out-of-the-box performance. All I did for benchmarking was switch the Windows 11 power profile to "Best Performance" and toggle the Maingear Control Center profile to "Performance" prior to benchmarking the Ultima 18.
Playing around with the Overclock options can get you a few extra frames, which actually brings Black Myth: Wukong close to the 60fps playability threshold in 4K on Cinematic settings without any DLSS. It also made Avowed feel like a fully-finished game, which is often difficult to do without relying on frame-gen.
Should you buy the Maingear Ultima 18?
You should buy the Maingear Ultima 18 if:
- You're in need of a new gaming laptop to replace your old rig.
- You want a gaming laptop that doesn't compromise on power.
- You don't need to commute with your laptop.
- You need a portable gaming machine.
- You have an RTX 40-series gaming rig.
Maingear's Ultima 18 lives up to its "no compromises" marketing. It's a colossal gaming rig, designed to be set up on your desk with all your accessories in place of a desktop tower or gaming mini PC. And for that, the Ultima 18 is perfect. It's not a travel gaming laptop, and it doesn't try to be. It's a bit pricey, but not as pricey as a decent used car like other 18-inch desktop replacement laptops, so it's kind of a great deal, as well as being an impressively powerful machine that more than earns its name.
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