MAINGEAR Packs NVIDIA’s Latest Desktop Quadro Into Its Pulse 15 Pro Notebook

One of the most obvious caveats of notebooks is that the performance won’t ever match desktops – but, that doesn’t mean that some vendors won’t put forth their best effort to tighten the gap as much as possible. A good example of how this is being done is with MAINGEAR’s new Pulse 15 Pro, a sleek 15-inch notebook that packs in a desktop-bound NVIDIA Quadro M2000. Oh, and it can also include Samsung’s 950 Pro M.2 SSDs and an Intel Xeon CPU, just in case a desktop Core i7 doesn’t do it for you.

We talked just earlier about NVIDIA’s new Quadro M2000. It’s the lowest-end Maxwell-based card in NVIDIA’s current lineup, and that’s going to remain the case until Pascal derivatives arrive. That might be a ways off, as NVIDIA launched a new top-end Quadro just last month, in the form of the M6000 24GB. It should be also noted that MAINGEAR isn’t the first to put a desktop-class Quadro in a notebook, as MSI showed off a notebook a few weeks ago with the brand-new M5500. That card is in effect a desktop GTX 980 tweaked for Quadro purposes, and has become the highest-end Quadro available for notebooks.

But enough about that; for now, we’re talking about MAINGEAR’s latest hotness. And it is indeed hot:

The Pulse 15 Pro is a 15-inch notebook, as mentioned, and weighs in at a mere 4 pounds. That’s quite impressive, especially when you consider the fact that this is a pure on-the-go workstation. It even includes a numpad, which could be useful for certain creation apps, games, or the always-exciting Excel spreadsheet scenario.

The stock configuration of the Pulse 15 Pro is priced at $2549 and includes an Intel Core i7-6700HQ (quad-core @ 2.6GHz), 16GB of DDR4-2133 memory, NVIDIA’s Quadro M2000 4GB, a 1080p display, a MAINGEAR-certified 256GB NVMe M.2 SSD, a 1TB 7200 RPM hard drive, Intel ac Wireless and Killer E2000 Ethernet, and even an ASUS DVD burner.

If you’re wanting to go a bit more high-end (yes, it’s possible), you could opt for an Intel Xeon E3-1505M processor, which is the only way to unlock the 4K monitor option. You could also upgrade to a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro SSD (2.5GB/s read), as well as opt for a Blu-ray burner. This would bump the price up to $3136, which really isn’t much of a premium over the stock configuration. Lead time on this particular configuration is the start of May, but you probably won’t want to wait long to figure out your ideal configuration.

It’s worth noting that the Pulse 15 also comes in a non-Pro version, which caters more towards gamers. The Quadro M2000 will be suitable enough for playing most of today’s games at 1080p. Just be prepared to throttle back some of the detail levels. For serious gaming, the Pulse 15 is the better option.