In brief: There are plenty of compact PCs available on the market, and many of them have pretty powerful hardware under the hood. However, Maingear is taking things a step further today with the reveal of its "Turbo" gaming machine line-up – each of which is, according to Maingear, "no larger than a shoebox."
Based on what we've seen, that description might be a tad generous. Unless you wear a particularly large set of boots, we're not sure how well the comparison holds up. They're small, with a height of one foot, a width of 6.7 inches, and a length of around 14.4 inches, but not that small.
Despite their diminutive size, Maingear's latest products pack quite a punch. They can support up to a 280mm radiator for watercooling, and ship with Gen4 PCIe NVMe SSDs. The most affordable Turbo is a custom configuration that comes in at $1,499. It includes an AMD Ryzen 5 3600, an AMD RX 5500 XT, a 240mm AIO cooler, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and a single 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD.
If you shell out an extra $200, you can snag the "Stage 1" Turbo, which is $1,699 and includes a few modest hardware upgrades. For example, the 3600 will be swapped out for a Ryzen 5 3600 XT, and the 8GB RAM kit is automatically replaced with a 16GB alternative (with a 3,600MHz clock speed).
Each of Maingear's new Turbo PCs targets a different resolution. The Stage 1 machine promises smooth gameplay at 1080p, the Stage 2 aims for 1440p (at $2200), and the Stage 4 boasts full 4K support at $3600. To enable stable framerates at these higher resolutions, the top-end Turbo PCs bring further improvements to the GPU (up to an RTX 2080 Ti), CPU (up to a Ryzen 9 3900 XT), and RAM capacity (up to 32GB).
With the announcement of AMD and Nvidia's next-gen video cards just around the corner, we're not sure if we'd recommend shelling out thousands of dollars for a pre-built machine running on current-gen graphics hardware. Regardless, if you're willing to bite the bullet, you can pre-order Maingear's Turbo machines right now, directly from the company's website. The units are expected to ship out to customers in "4-5 weeks."