maingear

Help Maingear pick a new desktop design

You know how a vendor will "leak" product info ahead of time to drum up interest in a conspiratorial kind of way? We have a feeling that's what's going on with these Maingear desktop concepts that conveniently found their way to our in-box this morning. We'll bite though, because they're so weird-looking (and heck, if Dell can do it, why not Maingear?). From what we gather, Maingear is trying to narrow down a design for Q1 2009.

All we have are external shots, so we have no idea what's going on inside. The … Read more

Rahul Sood on Blackbird's long upgrade path

In our recent review of the Dell XPS 730 H2C high-end gaming PC, we said the following to explain why we didn't include HP's competing Blackbird 002 in that review's performance charts.

"The reason is because HP hasn't moved to keep the Blackbird's specs up to date. We loved that system then, but we'd definitely think twice before purchasing one now...Until HP updates the Blackbird's configuration options, we can't take that system seriously as a high-end gaming PC."

As Rahul Sood tells it, it's not an accident that … Read more

Maingear goes mainstream with the Dash

New Jersey-based boutique PC manufacturer Maingear today announced its first mainstream system. In an odd bit of marketing, it claims to be selling the Dash Friends and Family PC so its existing customers have an affordable nongaming PC to recommend to their friends and, yes, family. While the baseline $799.99 is cheap compared with Maingear's high-end systems that it builds for gamers and home theater geeks, I did a quick price comparison to similar models from Dell and HP and found that Maingear's customers' friends and family members will be paying a bit of a premium for … Read more

A lab on fire: Five gaming PCs that torched our benchmarks

Let me start with a disclaimer: I'm a console gamer. Always have been, since my friend down the street in Minneapolis got an Atari 2600 in 1979, and I trumped him a year later with Mattel's Intellivision. (Along with George Plimpton, we found Intellivision's Major League Baseball to be clearly superior to Atari's Home Run baseball. Intellivision baseball, hockey, and skiing were pretty much all I cared about in 1980.) Like Larry King with wives, there's long list of consoles that I traded in for newer models over the years: Intellivision to Intellivision 2, to … Read more