The prospect of buying a high-end gaming PC like the Maingear Rush is always a fraught one. After all, while there are dozens of companies like Maingear that’ll put your rig together for a fee, there’s always the possibility of building it yourself looming over the whole affair. I went on Maingear’s website to price out the unit it sent for review, and it would cost an eye-watering $7,032 to buy. That’s a high price to pay for a PC that would otherwise cost around $5,000 to put together, so what is that extra $2,000 getting you?
For experienced PC builders, not much other than a really beautiful build. However, for anyone that shudders at the prospect of opening their PC and repairing or replacing components, the lifetime tech support just might be worth the price of entry.
Maingear Rush Artist Series – Photos
Design and Features
Since we’re talking about a PC that costs upwards of seven grand, there’s a certain level of opulence you should expect. And, with its airbrushed case and excellent cable management, the Maingear Rush absolutely delivers. This gaming PC is a way to get a TikTok-ready gaming setup without having to go through the headache of routing the cables yourself.
The build Maingear sent in for review has these gorgeous gray braided cable extensions for the motherboard, GPU and CPU power connections, which means even the few cables that are visible largely still fit the aesthetics of the overall rig. There are a few more cables that you can see, especially if you pop off the glass side panel to take a look at the innards, but these are small enough that they’re not noticeable. After all, one of the big selling points is that Maingear uses off-the-shelf components, so there are small fan headers and USB connections that need to be plugged in on the top-side of the motherboard.
Maingear has also found a way to build this PC in such a way that it could ship the system out without stuffing it full of foam. I’ve reviewed dozens of gaming PCs over the years, and nearly every single one has had a bunch of garbage shoved into the PC to stop the components from shifting – this one doesn’t. This is thanks largely to the surprisingly robust mounting solution for the graphics card. Now, the Maingear Rush is using an RTX 5090 Founders Edition, and I’ve spent a lot of time with that card and know how heavy it is – and yet I was able to unpack this machine without it having shifted at all.
That mounting solution also helps ensure that you won’t experience any graphics card sag over the years, which could have led to degraded performance or even a dead graphics card.
However, where in the past Maingear was known for creating custom PC cases, the Rush seems to be largely based off of the excellent Lian Li O11 Dynamic Evo XL. I haven’t been able to confirm whether or not this is the same case, but it’s not like it’d be a bad thing after all. This case allows you to easily take off any of the panels – front, side, back, etc. – to easily upgrade or service the machine. You can even pop off the back panel to easily access the power supply, which is side-mounted, and you get to see the neat cable management when you do.
The bottom of the front panel has two USB-A ports, a single USB-C port, along with a 3.5mm audio jack. I wish there were more USB-A ports, as I constantly have to swap between dongles depending on what I’m doing at the time. However, because this PC features the ASRock Phantom Gaming X870E Nova Wifi, there are plenty of USB ports around the back.
Also on the front of the case, but near the top of the PC, you’ll find the singular front-facing button on the rig, which is of course the power button. There are more buttons right around the corner, labeled with letters M, C, and B. However, in the month I’ve spent with the Rush, I still haven’t figured out what they do – nothing happens when I press them, that’s for sure.
Then, above these functionless letter-buttons, you’ll find the reset button. And, I mean, it’s absolutely good that there’s a reset button among the front panel buttons, but depending on how you have this PC situated on your desk, and whether or not you bind something to the other buttons just below it, I could totally see you reaching around to hit something else and rebooting your system. Not the end of the world, to be sure, but could be super annoying if you were in the middle of something.
Why Spend So Much?
Just like the Origin Millennium I reviewed earlier this year, the Maingear Rush is an extremely expensive PC. While the rig starts at $2,026, that’ll get you a laughable setup with a Ryzen 5 9600X, an RTX 5050 and 16GB of RAM, paired with a 1TB SSD. Now, I know graphics cards are getting more expensive these days, but that price for that PC is questionable at best. At the high-end though, we start getting into the territory of a luxury product that actually delivers a luxurious experience.
The Maingear Rush I was sent for review will set you back $7,032. That gets you an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, an RTX 5090 Founders Edition, 48GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. I priced that configuration out on PCPartPicker and at the time of writing, that same configuration would cost around $4800. That means you’re paying $2,300 for Maingear to assemble this PC for you.
That’s a large additional price tag, no matter how admittedly gorgeous this gaming PC is. But the real star of the show has to do with the customer support. Now, this is a hard thing for me to test, because after writing this, this PC is getting shipped back to Maingear, so I won’t have the opportunity for things to go wrong. However, Maingear talks a big game, offering lifetime free tech support, along with covering the labor costs for any repair the PC needs over its lifetime, on top of a one year warranty.
Whether or not that’s worth the extra price depends entirely on what you’re looking for. I’m a hardware nerd that jumps at the opportunity to fix my friends’ computers, so the idea of paying $2300 extra just to have someone build the system with the chance that I’ll need help sometime in the future? Probably not worth it.
However, for a lot of people that want a premium gaming PC without putting in the time to build the thing or having to worry about servicing it in the future, that’s an appealing offer – particularly if the lifetime part actually plays out. Either way, the Maingear Rush is definitely a luxury product that you should look at like an investment. You can get the same hardware elsewhere much cheaper, but it might not have the same level of technical support in the future – especially if you build it yourself.
Performance
Of course, with an RTX 5090 and a Ryzen 9 9950X3D, there isn’t much that this Maingear Rush can’t do. This is an absolute behemoth of a gaming PC, and with a 1650W power supply there’s room to push it even further if you’re comfy overclocking your graphics card.
Throughout our test suite, though, I noticed that the RTX 5090 in this machine underperformed the 5090 in my test rig by a bit, especially in 3DMark. In Speed Way, for instance, the Maingear Rush managed a score of 13,563, underperforming the same card by about 6%. Likewise, in Cyberpunk 2077, the Maingear rig manages 121 fps, compared to 131 fps with the same settings from my test bench.
There is always going to be some variance between different graphics cards, even when they’re using the same GPU. This likely has more to do with the silicon lottery than Maingear’s assembly, as the machine wasn’t throttling or anything. Still, Maingear absolutely could have overclocked the system to get it running a bit faster.
But even with some odd performance numbers, the Maingear Rush is still more than capable of playing any game I throw at it. I’ve been using this as my main PC for about a month, and didn’t actually notice the performance differential without staring at comparison data.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
