Boutique computer maker Maingear on Monday unleashed its Shift desktop PC, a child-sized "everyday supercomputer" that marries extreme performance and upgradeability to industrial design for a barnburning rig that can handle the highest-definition media.
Or, as the company's written in its marketing materials, "There's a fine line between genius and insanity. We've just erased it."
In a market crowded by players who use the same parts, Maingear's trying to differentiate itself with style, case engineering and quality technical support.
On the style front, the company's doing away with the blinking-lights-and-neon look of geeky gaming computers and ushering in an industrial look with straight lines and black-on-black aluminum attitude. In person, the Shift is a massive, steel-framed desktop tower -- almost the size of a seated small child, from my visual guesstimate -- and impressive in its footprint.
(It's actually 24 inches tall, 8.6 inches wide and 21.5 inches deep.)
The folks at Maingear are quite fervent about case engineering, and the Shift continues that tradition with bottom to top airflow, aggressive liquid cooling and a 90-degree rotation of the motherboard. Further, the system is fairly future-proof, and offers user-accessible expansion slots, full eATX motherboard support, full sized 5.25” optical drives, multiple SATA hard drive configurations and up to two 2.5” HDDs in each 3.5” HDD drive bay.
Finally, as CTO Chris Morley mentioned in a ZDNet interview back in June, customer support is the way his company is differentiating itself from other boutique shops. Maingear says each Shift owner will be able to talk directly to the builder that assembled their system. They'll also have virtual, private on-site support through an internal remote-desktop setup, as well as traditional on-site support when necessary.
Inside, it's full-on extreme computing. The $2,199 Shift P55 sports the following:
A Shift X58 model, which starts at $2,599, offers up to 12GB of DDR3 2,000MHz memory, another optional optical drive, two more drive bays (for a total of six) and the potential to easily blow several paychecks. In a test run, I was able to configure a Shift X58 to a breathtaking $13,394 without tangential software or accessories.
Here's the breakdown between the two models:
The company says a Shift system geared specifically toward creative professionals -- that's video production, audio editing, and CAD -- is coming before the end of the year.
The Shift series starts at $2,199 and is available from the company's website.
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