Kids these days will never know what it was like living through the early days of home PCs, when floppy disks, sharp edges, and beige colorways ruled the landscape. They’re about to get a history lesson of sorts, though, and from none other than Maingear, a popular boutique builder that’s been assembling custom desktops for over two decades. It’s latest offering, the Retro95, pays homage to the days of old by meshing classic aesthetics from when Amiga was a household name, with modern hardware that qualifies it as a powerhouse gaming PC for 2025.
On the outside, the Retro95 is beige, which for whatever reason was the chosen colorway by practically every PC maker back in the day. It’s also boxy just like an Amiga 2000, Commodore PC20, or any number of IBM compatible machines from the 1980s and 1990s. And it’s situated in a horizontal orientation. All that is missing is a streak of blood from where you may have cut your finger trying to get inside one of these classic systems.
All of that is just the outside appearance, though. Inside this sleeper PC is an assortment of cutting-edge hardware that belie its delightfully retro styling. While it may look like a PC from some 30 years ago, you can equip the Retro95 with a up to an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor (8C/16T, 4.7GHz to 5.2GHz, 8MB of L2 cache, 96MB of L3 cache, 120W TDP) sporting copious L3 cache for gaming.
Yeah, we’ve come a long way from when a 486DX2-66 was considered an elite chip, or anything in the Pentium category (most Amiga 2000 PCs, by the way, came standard with a Motorola 68000 processor clocked at 7.16MHz).
For graphics, the Retro95 sports up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 or AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, both of which are leaps and bounds ahead of anything you might have owned in the 1990s (including that 3dfx Voodoo card with a fancy AGP interface from the latter part of the decade). You can also stuff up to 96GB of DDR5 memory and up to 8TB of PCIe 4.0 solid state drive (SSD) storage in this thing. An 850W PSU supplies the juice, and of course Maingear tapped Noctua (known for its brownish/beige colorway) for the fans.
“This one is for the gamers who lugged CRTs to LAN parties, swapped out disks between levels, and got their gaming news from magazines. The Retro95 drop is our way of honoring the classic era of gaming, with a system that looks like the one you had as a kid, but runs like the monster you’d spec from Maingear today,” said Wallace Santos, Maingear CEO and founder.
Modern amenities also abound in the front panel I/O, which is hidden behind the retro shell. And if you really want to, you can select a DVD drive as a build option. Regardless of the exact configuration, each Retro95 is hand-built and tested with the same care that Maingear gives its other boutique builds.
Maingear’s Retro95 is available to configure today with a reasonable $1,599 starting price. Note that this is a limited edition drop, and “once it’s gone, it’s game over.”
