Maingear Announces Nomad 17 Gaming Laptop

Maingear has announced the arrival of its latest laptop release, the Nomad 17. The name fits the laptop perfectly since it’s a 17” portable gaming machine for serious gamers on the move. With impressive stats and a custom paint job, it’s a gamer’s dream machine.

The NOMAD 17 gaming laptop supports 3rd generation Intel® quad-core processors up to 3.8GHz for blazing performance and offers cool operation with maximum battery life, up to 32GB of DDR3-1600MHz RAM, and a full array of hard drive support including full size SSD and RAID 0 and 1 arrays.

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They really need to do something about the red and black top. Maybe just flat black or dark gray would be nicer and they are offering something like that at their site for a more sedate look. It's lame that they offer an upgraded GPU but don't give you the option of just not bothering with the discrete graphics. Even if you only plan to use the Intel HD 4000, you still have to pay for what'll become a pointless GTX 675M at minimum. 32 GB of RAM is pretty nice though and the processor selection isn't bad either.

Configured with an i7 35 watt quad core, 32 GB of memory, two 750 GB non-hybrid hard drives, it's still like $2,300. If they let you get rid of the graphics card, it'd probably sell for under $2,000.

This system is just a re-brand of the MSI GT 7x series. Many OEMs already selling it.

Maingear is a good OEM. But there are better ones out there already such as PowerNotebooks, XoticPC, etc.

Maingear does have their own in-house cystom paint service though.

SkribbelKat said:

Configured with an i7 35 watt quad core, 32 GB of memory, two 750 GB non-hybrid hard drives, it's still like $2,300. If they let you get rid of the graphics card, it'd probably sell for under $2,000.

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But with an Intell 4000 you wouldn't be able to play many games at decent framerates, or use the proper GPU for video editing/CAD/3d graphics/Photoshop/web browsing/etc. I wouldn't go about $500 for an HD only laptop, as it would be way more limited (even though Intel seems to think an HD 4000 can play anything, that mean reality asshole disagrees).

If you wanted to just browse the intertubes you would just get something else. Though 32GB would be nice for a 20GB ramdisk

DeathPrincess said:

But with an Intell 4000 you wouldn't be able to play many games at decent framerates, or use the proper GPU for video editing/CAD/3d graphics/Photoshop/web browsing/etc. I wouldn't go about $500 for an HD only laptop, as it would be way more limited (even though Intel seems to think an HD 4000 can play anything, that mean reality asshole disagrees).

If you wanted to just browse the intertubes you would just get something else. Though 32GB would be nice for a 20GB ramdisk

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Well, I just think the GPU, for me, would be a waste of money since I'd hardly use it, but it's hard to find a laptop with lots of memory slots that doesn't have a gaming graphics card in it. Since I'd like to just close the lid and hide it someplace so it can run virtual machines and be a totally self-contained testing platform the GPU is like...I dunno, pointless.

So, it costs about the same as a mac book pro, but is more useful to the world... Interesting...

eyeoncomputers said:

This system is just a re-brand of the MSI GT 7x series. Many OEMs already selling it.

Maingear is a good OEM. But there are better ones out there already such as PowerNotebooks, XoticPC, etc.

Maingear does have their own in-house cystom paint service though.

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And it's a huge ripoff, got my MSI for $1400 and the specs are about the same/better.

NickJames said:

And it's a huge ripoff, got my MSI for $1400 and the specs are about the same/better.

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If MSI is producing it, then Maingear is buying from them and is sort of forced to markup the price. They're proabably doing the painting thing as a value added feature so they can compete with a feature that's unavailable from the manufacturer so that and the handling/rebranding/support and the shirts and junk are what you pay for in markup plus whatever they can find in profits. I wonder if MSI offers a version without the graphics card though...

It's good to be back on the front page of HardOCP once again! For those of you who may not remember, HardOCP used to have an [H] Consumer division that evaluated systems anonymously by actually purchasing them. Needless to say there were some very interesting articles to come out of that!

In 2006 they did their one and only roundup and we came away with several awards. You can read the article here:

http://consumer.hardocp.com/article/2006/12/04/h_consumer_best_awards_2006

Best Technical Support
Best Boutique Integrator
Honorable Mention for Build Quality
Honorable Mention for Overall Value

Incidentally, [H] Consumer Managing Editor Chris Morley, who was succeeded by Jason Wall, eventually came to work for MAINGEAR, and has been here as our CTO for the past 5+ years.