Maingear’s first MG-1 PC from 2024 would’ve had all the makings of a great pre-built PC—if it hadn’t felt so DIY. Maingear’s back again with a new “MK II” version of that same case. There’s good news and bad news: it fixes my one big complaint with the first edition, but it also comes in at a price point that just seems excessive, even in today’s RAM-ravaged wasteland.
For review, Maingear dropped off a midsize tower from its New Jersey headquarters right on Gizmodo’s doorstep. The system has a relatively standard layout, but it’s filled with components that could tear through benchmarks if they were packed inside a shoebox with an ice pack. Maingear supplied a Founders Edition Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU alongside AMD’s latest Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition. It’s literally the pinnacle of consumer-end gaming PCs on sale today. 4 Maingear MG-1 (2026) A great-performing desktop PC with little pizazz and big price. Pros Fun removable front panels Excellent cable management Great performance with these specs Cons Tall price for a simple case Annoying-as-hell side panel Limited front ports You can probably already guess that this thing is going to be pricey, but I’d still suggest that you swallow any water you happen to be drinking before reading the following. The case starts at $2,509 for a version with an Nvidia RTX 5060, an Intel Core Ultra 5 225F CPU, and 32GB of RAM. That’s already pricey for such low-end specs, but watch what happens when you aim as high as you can go: my MG-1 (2026), with the latest and greatest CPU/GPU combo, comes out to around $6,816. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo Believe it or not, that price is not out of bounds with other pre-builts in 2026. An HP Omen Max 45L that I reviewed earlier this year costs $6,500, though it comes with more RAM and an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, not the version with the extra 3D cache that makes these CPUs so good for gaming. Maingear’s systems are usually more expensive than alternatives. An iBuyPower Trace X PC with an RTX 5080 and the best-for-gamers Ryzen 7 9850X3D came out to around $3,450 when I reviewed it last month. A Maingear MG-1 “MKII” with similar specs costs $4,473.
