The Eluktronics MAX-15 is the lightest gaming laptop I’ve ever tested with Nvidia RTX
Max-P 2070 graphics, making it a portable, yet powerful option. Let’s check it out
in this detailed review and find out just how well it holds up.
My MAX-15 has an Intel i7-9750H CPU, Nvidia RTX 2070 graphics, this is NOT Max-Q, 16gb
of memory in dual channel, a 15.6” 1080p 144Hz screen, and a 512gb NVMe M.2 SSD.
For network connectivity it’s got gigabit ethernet, WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5. The MAX-15
is also available with different specs, like RTX 2060 or different storage and memory options,
you can find examples and updated prices linked in the description.
If 17 inches is more your thing, then make sure you’re subscribed for my upcoming comparison
between the MAX-15 and larger MAX-17.
The laptop is made out of magnesium alloy, the lid is a matte silver with the Eluktronics
logo in the center, while the interior has the same feel and colour. Overall it felt
quite solid and well built, the corners are rounded however the front edge felt a little
sharp if you rub it on the wrong angle.
The weight is listed 3.82 pounds, and this is what I got, or 1.7kg. With the 230 watt
power brick and cables for charging included, the total rises up to almost 2.6kg, or 5.7
pounds.
This makes the MAX-15 lighter when compared to other 15 inch laptops I’ve tested with
the same RTX 2070 graphics.
The dimensions were also smaller when compared to most other 15 inch gaming laptops, and
although it wasn’t the thinnest I’ve tested, under 2cm for this level of power is quite
impressive. This smaller footprint gives it just 7mm screen bezels on the sides.
The 15.6” 1080p 144Hz IPS screen has a matte finish, viewing angles looked fine, and there’s
no G-Sync. There’s no option of disabling Optimus, so that will always be on.
I’ve tested the screen with the Spyder 5, and got 95% of sRGB, 65% of NTSC, and 70%
of AdobeRGB. At 100% brightness I measured the panel at 346 nits in the center with a
610:1 contrast ratio, so fair results for a gaming laptop, bit lower on the contrast
than I’d like though.
Backlight bleed seemed fine in my unit, I never actually noticed any problems when viewing
darker content, but this will vary by laptop and panel.
There was some screen flex when intentionally trying to move it, but it felt quite sturdy
due to the magnesium alloy build, and this is further aided by the hinges being out towards
the corners.
It was possible to open it up with one finger, demonstrating an even weight distribution,
no problems using it on my lap.
As a result of the thinner bezels, the 720p camera is found underneath the display in
the center. It’s got IR for Windows Hello support.
The camera’s down the bottom so when you type your fingers do kind of get in the way,
and I’ve got to put the screen right back if I actually want to be in the frame. Here’s
what it sounds like when you set the fan to max speed, so it does get pretty loud and
you can still can kind of hear me over the fan but it’s not really isolating my voice.
The membrane keyboard has RGB backlighting which is controlled in 4 separate zones, it’s
got 7 different lighting effects, and it lights up all keys and secondary key functions. Key
brightness can be adjusted between 4 levels or turned off completely using either the
software, or F6 and F7 shortcut keys. It looks a bit cramped as it’s got a numpad too,
but I didn’t personally have any problems using it, it felt good to type with, here’s
how the keys sound to give you an idea of what to expect.
There’s an extra button next to the power button above the keyboard which can be used
for cycling between the different performance modes, more on those soon.
Keyboard flex was on the lower side when intentionally pushing down hard, overall it felt quite solid
due to the metallic body, absolutely no issues during normal use.
The glass precision touchpad physically clicks down when pressed. It worked very well, was
very smooth to the touch and I was happy with the overall size. You can double tap the top
left corner to disable or enable the touchpad.
Fingerprints and dirt don’t really show up, they’re harder to see on the silver
finish, but as it’s a smooth surface it’s quite easy to clean with a microfiber cloth.
On the left from the back there’s a Kensington lock, air exhaust vent, gigabit ethernet,
USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A port and 3.5mm mic and headphone jacks.
On the right from the front there’s a MicroSD card slot, two USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports,
and an air exhaust vent on this side too.
The back has air exhaust vents towards the corners, then for I/O from left to right there
are two mini DisplayPort outputs, HDMI 2.0 output, and these are connected directly to
the Nvidia graphics, USB 3 Type-C port, no Thunderbolt though, and power input.
There’s an RGB light bar on the front which can be customized with some effects through
the software, you can control all 23 of the lights individually too.
Underneath there are plenty of air vents towards the back half for intake, otherwise it’s
quite clean. The bottom panel was extremely easy to remove, just take out 11 Phillips
head screws and it basically pops out by itself.
Once inside we’ve got the two PCIe NVMe M.2 slots in the middle towards the left,
two memory slots in the middle, the WiFi card to the right of that and battery down the
front.
The speakers are found on the left and right sides near the front. They sounded a bit above
average, still a bit tinny but that seems normal for most laptops. They got loud enough
at maximum volume, however the latencymon results weren’t looking good.
The MAX-15 is powered by a 4 cell 62wh battery. I’ve tested it with the screen brightness
at 50%, background apps disabled, and keyboard lighting off. While just watching YouTube
videos, it lasted for 4 hours and 55 minutes, which is a pretty average result compared
to most other laptops I’ve tested, but a better result when compared to the other i7
plus 2070 machines.
Unfortunately the gaming test didn’t work. Normally I test how long The Witcher 3 can
run at medium settings with the 30 FPS frame cap from Nvidia battery boost, however as
soon as I unplugged it the frame rate held at just 13 FPS which wasn’t really usable.
While an unusual result, I never recommend gaming on battery power anyway for a number
of reasons, I’ll leave a link to a post I recently wrote in the description explaining
this further.
Now let’s find out how hot the MAX-15 gets and see if this causes any issues to performance.
The control panel software lets you select different performance modes, which from lowest
to highest are office mode, game mode, and turbo mode. In office mode there are three
different fan options, but you can also customize the curve. In game or turbo mode you can enable
fan boost which sets the fan to maximum speed.
Turbo mode also enables Eluktroboost, however the difference with the 2070 model won’t
be as much as the 2060 version, as the thermal headroom for the GPU is close to the 115 watt
cap. If thermals permit though, it is possible for the maximum power to rise above this.
The MAX-15 has a -0.05v undervolt to the CPU by default, this can be changed in BIOS or
software, and my unit has stock thermal paste.
Inside there are 3 heatpipes shared between the processor and graphics, along with two
fans on either side that exhaust out of the back and sides.
Thermals were tested with a 21 degree Celsius ambient room temperature. Idle results down
the bottom were ok. Worst case stress tests were done with the Aida64 CPU stress test
with CPU only checked and the Heaven benchmark at max settings at the same time, and gaming
was tested with Watch Dogs 2 as I find it to use a good combination of processor and
graphics.
With Office mode enabled, the CPU was capped to a thermal throttle limit of 80 degrees
Celsius, and this limit was being hit in both of these tests. With game mode enabled, the
CPU thermal throttle limit increases up to 85 degrees, and again this is now being reached.
With the highest turbo mode enabled, the cap raises another 5 degrees to 90, and again
this limit was still being reached, even with the cooling pad in use. GPU temperatures were
also on the warmer side, averaging 84 degrees at the highest point, however the graphics
weren’t thermal throttling.
These are the clock speeds for the same tests, the CPU difference is pretty small between
office and gaming modes, despite the 5 degree difference, and strangely enough the performance
actually dropped back in the stress test. CPU clock speeds increase further in turbo
mode, but even with the cooling pad we’re not hitting the full 4GHz all core turbo boost
speed of the 9750H. My usual -0.15v undervolt to the CPU almost got us there, but it wasn’t
stable. The GPU clock speeds are all over the place, turbo mode actually saw lower results
until the cooling pad was added.
When looking at the power limits we can see the RTX 2070 was averaging around the 115
watt limit regardless of the mode being used, so this means we’ll probably expect excellent
gaming performance even with office mode, more on that shortly. We can see the CPU power
increasing with the clock speed, as the thermal cap boosts as we shift between the modes it’s
going to draw more power as a result, as more power equals more heat.
In CPU only workloads like Cinebench, the 9750H would power limit throttle at its 100
watt limit, which is pretty impressive given this is stock settings for the MAX-15. As
a result, even in the lowest office mode we’re seeing excellent Cinebench scores, with over
3000 points being hit in game mode and above.
Here’s how it looks in the areas where you’ll actually touch, at idle it was in the mid
30s in the center, a bit above the usual 30 or so I typically see with most other machines.
With the stress tests going in office mode the center of the keyboard gets to 50 degrees,
however as air is pulled in through the keyboard the WASD keys are much cooler comparatively.
Stepping up to game mode the keyboard gets a few degrees warmer now, and some of the
keys were pretty warm to the touch, but the sides were still cool, and then turbo mode
was pretty much the same, no notable differences.
Let’s have a listen to how loud the fans get.
The fans were still quite audible at idle, even with the quiet fan mode enabled. With
the stress tests going the fans were louder than I expected with the fans set to quiet
mode, at least in this worst case workload. Game mode and turbo mode were a little louder,
and there was no difference between leaving the fans on the automatic speed or manually
enabling fan boost, as they were already maxing out in auto mode, which is why I didn’t
separately test thermals for max fans earlier.
I’ve tested Shadow of the Tomb Raider to see how the different modes actually affect
game performance, and office mode with quiet fans is still performing quite well, so you
can definitely get acceptable gaming performance with lower temperatures, though as we just
heard the fans aren’t that much quieter.
Next let’s find out just how well the MAX-15 actually performs in games. I’ve tested
with turbo mode and fan boost enabled for best results.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested using the game’s built in benchmark tool. High settings
was still able to give decent average frame rates considering this is a resource heavy
game.
Battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode, I’ve got the results with RTX enabled, shown
by the green bars, and RTX off, shown by the purple bars. It was pretty playable with RTX
on, though as a first person shooter game you’ll probably want the higher FPS that
can be obtained with RTX off, which ran much better.
Control was also tested with and without RTX enabled. The game still plays ok with lower
frame rates for the most part, so RTX even with the highest setting was usable, but I
personally preferred high settings with RTX off which averaged above 60 FPS.
Apex Legends was tested with either all settings at maximum, or all settings on the lowest
possible values, as it doesn’t have predefined setting presets. The 144 FPS frame cap was
being hit at minimum settings, and even maxed out it was still running well, easily above
100 FPS.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare was tested in campaign mode, and I’ve also tested it with
the settings either maxed out or at minimum. Minimum settings was almost at 100 FPS in
this test, however it still played pretty well even with everything at maximum.
Fortnite was tested with the replay feature, and as a less demanding game epic settings
wasn’t too far behind the refresh rate of the screen, so no problems playing it all.
If you’re after more gaming benchmarks check the card in the top right corner where I’ve
tested 20 games in total on the MAX-15.
Let’s also take a look at how this config of the MAX-15 compares with other laptops,
use these results as a rough guide only as they were tested at different times with different
drivers.
In Battlefield 5 I’ve got the MAX-15 highlighted in red near similarly specced machines. The
performance is ahead of the thicker ASUS Scar III which also has RTX 2070 graphics, however
it’s a little behind the thicker GP75, granted that does have a GPU overclock by default.
The MAX-15 is behind the GX502 here, as that one gets a boost from G-Sync, however it’s
also worth noting the GX502 weighs more than 320g or 0.7lb more than the MAX-15. Definitely
a fair result for the weight and size, coming in just a couple FPS behind some of the far
more expensive 2080 Max-Q laptops.
These are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built in benchmark.
This time the results are very similar to the GP75, and probably as this is a CPU sensitive
test so I suspect the small undervolt would be aiding it here. The GX502 is still ahead
though, the ability for it to bypass Optimus typically gives it an edge, however its extra
weight is probably additional cooling material.
These are the results from Shadow of the Tomb raider with the built in benchmark at highest
settings. Like the other games, the MAX-15 was a little ahead of the Scar III with same
specs, however as more of a GPU heavy test the overclocked GP75 was in front, however
it’s still a fair improvement when compared to the 2060 laptops. It would be interesting
to see how the MAX-15 with Eluktroboosted 2060 compares.
With the RTX 2070, the performance is comparable to other 2070 based laptops I’ve tested
despite the MAX-15 being on the thinner side and easily lighter when compared against all
the other options. In terms of power to weight ratio, the MAX-15 would be ahead.
I’ve used Adobe Premiere to export one of my laptop review videos at 4K. As generally
seems to be the case, once you have an i7 and GTX 1660 Ti diminishing returns are pretty
heavy with higher specs in this particular workload.
Now for the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine,
as well as Firestrike, Timespy and Port Royal from 3DMark, just pause the video if you want
a detailed look at these results.
I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test the storage, and the 512GB NVMe M.2 SSD was performing
fairly for both reads and writes.
For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.
At the time of recording, in the US the MAX-15 with RTX 2070 that I’ve tested here goes
for $1600 USD, or you can get the RTX 2060 configuration for $1400 USD. They’ve also
recently started selling on Newegg, and ship internationally to quite a few different countries,
so that’s worth checking out too.
This seems like quite a good price for what you’re getting. For comparison, the ASUS
GX502 with same specs is closer to $2000 USD. It performed a bit better in most titles due
to having G-Sync, but it’s over 300g or 0.7 pounds heavier. It’s marginally thinner,
but for 25% more money? I’d get the MAX-15.
With all of that in mind let’s conclude by looking at the good and bad aspects of
the MAX-15 gaming laptop.
The most impressive aspect of the MAX-15 was just the sheer amount of power that can be
packed inside a 15” chassis while being so much lighter compared to other options
out there. It doesn’t feel that heavy and along with slimmer dimensions it’s quite
a portable machine. The build quality was also excellent, the entire thing is magnesium
alloy with a clean finish.
Despite being on the lighter and slimmer side, the performance was fairly similar when compared
to other heavier 2070 laptops that I’ve tested. This does however seem to come at
the expense of thermal throttling. Now to be fair, the CPU thermals are hard capped
to 90 degrees Celsius so it won’t get hotter than this. This does mean that performance
is lost, however it also means that the internals aren’t going to get crazy hot, I think it
offers a good balance between temperatures and performance, all things considered.
If it were my money, I’d definitely pay the extra for the liquid metal upgrade, as
improving thermals in the MAX-15 should directly correlate to increased performance, which
we saw when using a cooling pad.
There’s a decent port selection, however I would have personally preferred a full sized
SD card slot rather than micro, and I know some people would have also wanted Thunderbolt
3, however that is an option with the larger MAX-17.
The screen was decent for a gaming laptop, bit lower on the contrast, but fair colours
and brightness with minimal bleed in my unit.
The battery life outside of gaming was about average, however when you take the specs into
consideration it’s one of the best I’ve tested. Unfortunately when actually playing
games though, the battery can’t seem to hold a stable playable framerate in resource
heavier titles.
All things considered, the MAX-15 is a great laptop for the money, especially for those
that want power without having to carry around a larger and heavier machine, or otherwise
paying more money to get the same specs in a similar form factor like the more expensive
and heavier GX502.
Let me know what you thought about the Eluktronics MAX-15 gaming laptop down in the comments,
and if you’re new to the channel consider getting subscribed for future laptop reviews
and tech videos like this one.