Maingear has long been a custom PC build staple for a lot of gamers, whether that’s prestige products like the Maingear Turbo, the Maingear MG-1, or the dozen or so other product lines the New Jersey-based PC builder has put out over the years.
Well, you can honestly put all those aside, because the newest crop of Maingear PCs are in a class all their own.
Maingear is showing off three gaming PC product lines at CES 2025, and all three of them are stunners in their own right.
First, there’s the Maingear Shroud Signature Collection, which continues Maingear’s collaboration with the popular video game streamer Shroud.
The second series is the Maingear Apex Rush, and quite frankly, I’ll skip over the details here for a moment, because I have a lot more to say about them in a minute.
Finally, there’s the Maingear Apex Force, which is an absolute beast of a machine, complete with angled chrome piping like a bonafide hotrod.
I’ll go through each in turn, so read on to learn more about why Maingear’s newest gaming PCs are the best I’ve seen at CES this year.
The Maingear Shroud Signature Collection
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First up is the Maingear Shroud Signature Collection, which is a pair of PCs built in collaboration with professional streamer and former Valorant pro Shroud.
The PC, which features a UniSheet heat-formed glass panel to showcase the components inside from the front and the side, comes in either white or black, features a built-in LCD screen inside the case, a glass GPU airflow director emblazoned with Shroud’s signature (get it?), and a special badge on the PC case listing the PC’s serialized order number and date of assembly.
Given the PC’s namesake, the components inside are equally impressive.
At launch, it will come with the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, the top-tier Nvidia RTX 5000-series GPU (whichever is the highest you can get when you order), the ASRock Phantom Gaming X870E Nova WiFi motherboard, 48GB T-Force Xtreem ARGB DDR5-8000, 2TB T-Force Cardea PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD, a 1200W FSP PTM Pro Gen 5 80+ Cybernetics Platinum power supply, and a Maingear 420mm AIO cooler with 25mm thick radiator and liquid metal thermal interface for the CPU.
While these specs aren’t expected to change, who knows what the future will bring. The above will at least serve as a baseline spec for the collection.
Maingear Apex Force
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Also introduced at CES 2025 is the Maingear Apex Force custom-built, fully liquid-cooled PC.
Starting with an enormous full tower case based on the Phantek NV9, cable management is kept discreetly hidden in a rear chamber of the case while the panoramic wrap-around tempered glass shows off the internals.
Inside, you’ll find precision-engineered 10-degree-angled chrome tubing that matches the angle of the bottom case panel, which pumps liquid through a 420mm-long, 60mm thick AIO radiator fitted with three 140mm wide, 30mm thick fans to carry away heat from both the CPU and GPU.
The Apex Force is also customizable with Intel and AMD’s latest CPUs, paired with the best Nvidia graphics cards available at the time of your order.
The custom cooling loop is also customizable, including the color of the coolant used, the type and color of the tubing, and the material and color of the tube fittings used throughout the build.
Maingear Apex Rush
OK, so I waited til the end here to talk about the Maingear Apex Rush Artwork editions, because these are simply too sick to not dig into in more detail.
There are three distinct PC designs, called ‘Cyber Gamer’, ‘Good Fortune’, and ‘Vaporware Drive’.
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Cyber Gamer has a very distinct Cyberpunk 2077 vibe, including soft, braided cooling tubes, reminiscent of a cybernetic implant. There’s a cyberpunk-styled woman on the case as well, giving the case some additional character. Any fans of Netflix’s Edgerunners anime will probably already be drooling at this point.
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Good Fortune is an Asian-inspired design, with a distinctive charm and animal motif throughout, soft color pallete, and adorable koi fish, foxes, and cat characters on various parts of the case. Inside, brass-colored tubes and fittings blend in perfectly with the rest of the case’s aesthetics.
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Vaporware Drive, however, is the design that triggered my 80’s kid lizard brain, touching something primordial that I didn’t even know still resided in my psyche.
OK, that might be overstating things, but my god, just look at this case. While all of the Apex Rush Artwork cases are full of interesting details, Vaporware Drive’s back panel shows off a city skyline with a setting 80’s sun (yes kids, the sun actually lost horizontal stripes when it set back then. Look it up), and there’s a building with a neon sign that reads 14.37 DPS.
If you don’t know, that’s the damage per second of an upgraded StarCraft II zergling, which is the kind of absolutely unnecessary detail that makes me love this design so damned much.
It should also be noted that there is also an undecorated Apex Rush design, which features all of the same internals, but none of the extra flair beyond the already awesome-looking case, internals, and overall design.
Pricing and availability
At the moment, no pricing or availability has been specified for any of these PCs, though you can go to Maingear’s website to learn more, customize your builds, and order directly from the company once the PCs are available.
Maingear is also offering a $100 reserve option for these PCs which will hold your place in the order and build queue,, a deposit that is entirely refundable and which will be put toward the final cost of the PC that Maingear builds.
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John.Loeffler@futurenet.com (John Loeffler)
