Eluktronics MAX-17 Review
The Eluktronics MAX-17 is one of the lightest 17 inch gaming laptops I’ve tested that has up to RTX Max-P 2070 graphics inside, making it a more portable, but powerful option. Let’s check it out in this detailed review and find out just how well it holds up.
My MAX-17 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-17 is also available with different specs, like RTX 2060, GTX 1660 Ti or different storage and memory options, you can find examples and updated prices linked in the description. If you’d instead prefer a smaller 15 inch version, I’ll be comparing the MAX-17 with the MAX-15 in an upcoming video, so make sure you’re subscribed for that one. The laptop is made out of magnesium alloy, the lid is a matte black and completely clean with no logo. The interior is also the same matte black, and it looks and feels great. The build quality feels solid as it’s all metal, and all corners and edges are rounded and smooth.
The weight is listed at 4.71 pounds, and mine weighed a bit more at 4.93 pounds, or 2.2kg. With the 230 watt power brick and cables for charging included, the total rises up to under 3.1kg, or 6.8 pounds. This makes the MAX-17 lighter when compared to many other 17 inch laptops with similar or even lower powered Max-Q graphics options. The dimensions were also smaller when compared to many other 17 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 8mm screen bezels on the sides. The 17.3” 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 96% of sRGB, 67% of NTSC, and 72% of AdobeRGB. At 100% brightness I measured the panel at 334 nits in the center with a 900:1 contrast ratio, so decent results for a high refresh gaming laptop.
Backlight bleed wasn’t too bad, I never noticed the bottom right section 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, and it’s got IR for Windows Hello support.
As the camera is down the bottom your fingers kind of get in the way while typing, and if you want to properly be in the frame you’ve got to put the screen back a fair bit. Here’s what it sounds like when the fan is set to max speed, so it is pretty loud initially and it tries to isolate your voice but it’s not doing the best job. 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. There’s a numpad on the right which looks a bit cramped, but I had no problems using it, and the keyboard 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 was very smooth to the touch and worked fairly well, however I had some issues clicking down in the bottom left and right corners as it seems to just have a lot of space to move. It’s hard to explain, but sometimes I get annoyed while using it. The size was on the larger side, and you can disable or enable it by double tapping the top left corner.
Fingerprints and dirt don’t really show up very easily due to the matte 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, 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’s a Type-C Thunderbolt 3 port, HDMI 2.0b output which is connected directly to the Nvidia graphics, gigabit ethernet and the 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.
I found it interesting that the battery wasn’t a bit longer to utilize that empty space as it’s below the 100Wh limit. The speakers are found on the left and right sides near the front. They sounded above average with a little bass present. They got loud at maximum volume, and the latencymon results looked good.
The MAX-17 is powered by a 6 cell 91wh battery. I’ve tested it with the screen brightness at 50%, background apps disabled, and keyboard lighting off. it lasted for 7 hours and 9 minutes, which is an excellent result when compared to most others I’ve tested, and by far the best I’ve seen from a Max-P 2070 laptop. While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS the battery lasted for an hour and 16 minutes. At this point, it still had 29% charge remaining and the frame rate dipped down to 5 FPS and was no longer usable, but it lasted 2 hours and 4 minutes if you include that.
The MAX-17 with RTX 2060 or 2070 has the 230 watt power brick, but the 1660 Ti model has a lower powered 180 watt brick. Now let’s find out how hot the MAX-17 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 or 1660 Ti versions, 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 boost
above this.
The MAX-17 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 applied. 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, however when we add the cooling pad it was now able to get even hotter. It appears that the cap was further raised once better cooling was available. GPU temperatures were also on the warmer side, however the thermal throttle limit wasn’t being hit outside of brief spikes.
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. CPU clock speeds increase more in turbo mode, but even with the cooling pad we’re not quite hitting the full 4GHz all core turbo boost speed of the 9750H. It’s worth noting that the speeds seen here are higher when compared to the MAX-15 under the same tests, so the larger chassis seems to have its advantages. The GPU clock speeds were lowest in office mode, stepping up with all other modes. This was despite the 2070 being able to run at its 115w limit during all of these tests. We’re only seeing the CPU power level rise as we step up through the performance modes. As each mode boosts the CPU thermal throttle limit, performance increases as a result of
more power being available, and more power equals more heat.
In CPU only workloads like Cinebench, the 9750H would thermal throttle near its 100 watt limit while running at 95 watts, which is pretty impressive given this is stock settings for the MAX-17. As a result, even in the lowest office mode we’re seeing excellent Cinebench scores, around 3000 points is a great result for this i7 processor, especially out of the box. 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, maybe a tiny bit warmer but no real big difference. Let’s have a listen to how loud the fans get.
The fans were still 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-17 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 wasn’t too far behind this. 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 close to 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-17. Let’s also take a look at how this config of the MAX-17 compares with other laptops, use these results as a rough guide only as they were tested at different times with different drivers. Starting with Battlefield 5 I’ve got the MAX-17 highlighted in red near similarly specced machines. In this game, the performance was about the same as the smaller MAX-15, which is just below it on this graph. The results are somewhere in between the other 2070 laptops I’ve tested, so fair results considering the MAX-17 is on the thinner side.
These are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built in benchmark. This time the MAX-17 saw an improvement over the MAX-15, and was now actually beating all of the other 2070 laptops that I’ve done this test with. The 1% low is right up there too, coming in third out of this selection. These are the results from Shadow of the Tomb raider with the built in benchmark at highest settings. Again the results were a little ahead of the smaller MAX-15 with same specs, and close to the heavier and larger GP75. The ASUS GX502 seems to perform better though despite being smaller, most likely due to the ability of bypassing Optimus, but it does also cost more too. As I suspected in my MAX-15 review, the MAX-17 does indeed perform a little better, likely due to the larger chassis which seems to offer a little cooling advantage. The MAX-17 is also a fair bit lighter than those other 17 inch machines too, while also being cheaper, so it’s got a good power to weight ratio for those that prefer portability with power.
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-17 with RTX 2070 that I’ve tested here goes for $1800 USD, or you can get the RTX 2060 configuration for $1600, or $1500 for the lowest GTX 1660 Ti option. 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 a powerful 17” gaming laptop. If we look at others with a similar form factor such as the Razer Blade Pro 17, ASUS Zephyrus GX701 or Gigabyte Aero 17, they all cost more, weigh more, and in most cases are also slightly larger. With all of that in mind let’s conclude by looking at the good and bad aspects of the MAX-17 gaming laptop. If I hadn’t already tested the smaller 15 inch MAX-15 with same specs, I’d be more impressed by the MAX-17 as it’s available with the same specs in a smaller and lighter form factor. That’s not to say the MAX-17 isn’t impressive, as mentioned it stacks up well compared to the other 17 inch machines out there for less money while also being a fair bit lighter, and when compared to the MAX-15, the larger chassis does give it better performance in games due to better cooling. 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 comparable 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, well at least until you add a cooling pad and improve the cooling. This does mean that some 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-17 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. The screen was pretty good for a gaming laptop, decent colours, contrast and brightness for a high refresh rate panel, and bleed was minimal in my unit. Battery life was excellent. Not only were the results some of the best out of all laptops tested, it’s lasting significantly longer when compared to other gaming laptops with the same specs. I personally found the touchpad a little annoying to use at times, the far bottom corners were just difficult to press for me occasionally. It was especially noticeable when using the MAX-15 side by side which I thought was better which I thought was better in that regard. For the most part, the MAX-17 is basically a larger 17 inch version of the MAX-15 that I’ve previously reviewed, however it’s got Thunderbolt which the MAX-15 is missing, and performs a little better, likely due to the larger chassis.
Personally I’d prefer the smaller and more portable 15 inch for less money, but that’s just me - I’ll compare both in depth in a future video. All things considered, the MAX-17 is a good laptop for the money, especially for those that want power and a larger screen without having to carry around a heavier machine, or otherwise paying more money to get similar performance from an alternative 17 inch laptop.