- Maingear Retro98 PC is the latest in its “nostalgic sleep PC series”
- This limited edition looks like a beige PC from the ’90s, complete with frills like a Turbo button on the front.
- However, it packs powerful hardware, including up to an RTX 5090 GPU and a Ryzen 9950X3D CPU, and this PC doesn’t come cheap, as you might imagine.
Maingear just revealed a new pre-built desktop computer that’s perfect for nostalgia fans longing for a return to the 1990s, when tower PCs were bland beige boxes.
The Retro98 is part of Maingear’s “nostalgic sleep PC series” and is a limited edition gaming PC. In fact, only 32 of these computers will be made (plus six ‘alpha units’, which doesn’t mean prototypes, but these are the high-end PCs that are cooled by a custom Alphacool open circuit).
As the name suggests, the Retro98 is designed to look like a tower PC from the late ’90s and comes in a SilverStone FLP02 case.
You get an LED display on the front that shows fan speed and, gasp, a Turbo button too, as well as ‘ketchup and mustard’ sleeved cable color schemes and, well, a completely authentic ’90s look.
However, as Maingear points out, don’t let the boxy beige exterior fool you into thinking this is a pedestrian PC, because it definitely isn’t. The base spec starts with an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K graphics card and Nvidia RTX 5070, priced at $2,499 in the US, and goes all the way up to those Alphacool units with an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D plus RTX 5090, at $9,799.
Analysis: PCs that were all beige
These are some really powerful PCs, with a very distinctive retro look, as you can see. While Retro98 won’t be for everyone by any means, those of us who remember the ’90s, and played Quake Clan games via dial-up modem (when QuakeWorld was revolutionary for 56K modem gamer pings), will be transported back in time in a good way.
The Retro98 sparked a nice conversation this afternoon in TechRadar’s chat about long-forgotten PC makers (in the UK), mentioning some names I haven’t heard in a long time. (Like Viglen, for example, and Evesham, a company I’ve bought several PCs from in the past.)
Of course, these are very expensive platforms, but what price can you put on a piece of history? Although the story has been resurrected, revitalized. That said, ten thousand dollars is a bit, and then some, for that top model, of which there are only six.
Still, Maingear reminds us that you’ll get lifetime support with these limited-edition machines, which are “not put together beige boxes, they’re purpose-built, reinforced for longevity, and tuned to squeeze out every last drop of performance.”
Don’t forget to press the Turbo button.
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