Review: Maingear MG-1

There’s no better way to get the kind of powerhouse gaming PC you need than to customize it yourself. But building one can be a huge hassle, even if you know what you’re doing. Several well-known PC manufacturers, like NZXT, have tried to streamline the process of customizing and building your gaming PCs. With the MG-1, Maingear not only offers an excellent PC, but one of the best ways to design your prebuilt tower.

The MG-1 comes in several preset builds. It starts out with the MG-1 Silver ($1,199), which is the cheapest version and comes with an RTX 4060 graphics card. The MG-1 Platinum ($1,749) upgrades that card to the RTX 4070, and so forth, all the way up to the MG-1 Ultimate ($3,999) which is about as beefy as you can get, with an RTX 4090.

There are plenty of configurations and price points in between, so you can find the build that works best for your needs and budget without having to think too hard about how it all fits together. The MG-1 also comes with a one-year warranty on the full system and all the parts within it, though some parts may have longer warranties.

Photograph: WIRED

The MG-1 arrived completely put together, and I even popped the side panel off to take a look at the cabling myself. I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to desktop cable management, and it all looked tight and clean. I was able to plug the desktop into my existing dual-monitor setup—a Dell and an AOC, both 1080p—and get up and running in minutes.

It’s all too common for gaming PCs to lean into unfocused or even straight-up ugly designs, but the MG-1 is strikingly attractive. It has a glass panel on the side and a built-in strip of LEDs around the rim, all set to use a rainbow spectrum by default. The case is around 16.5" x 19" x 8", which is rather large, though about the size of my personal (also, very large) desktop. It fit easily under my desk, but you might want to measure your space before buying.

Photograph: Maingear

The front panel is customizable at time of purchase. For an extra $100, you can upload your own design, and Maingear will print it onto a magnetic panel that you can replace in seconds. Since it’s so easy to pop them on and off, you could get more than one and switch them out. Most people might only want one, but if you happen to be a streamer–or just have a lot of cash to spare on your aesthetic–you could get several and swap them out in seconds.

Internally, the case is incredibly spacious. The Ultimate configuration ($3,999) comes with Nvidia’s gargantuan RTX 4090 graphics card, and it slots nicely inside. On the motherboard, there’s one M.2 SSD, and there’s an empty slot where you can install a second one if you need to upgrade your space. If you’re a media hog like me, there’s space for a couple HDDs in the compartment at the bottom of the tower (more on that below.)

The ports on the rear of the PC will vary based on which motherboard and GPU you choose, but on the MG-1 Silver there are six USB-A ports, an Ethernet port, three audio outputs (for surround sound), two Wi-Fi antenna connectors, and an HDMI port. On the RTX 4060, there are three DisplayPorts and one HDMI output.

With that said, I tested the MG-1 Silver, which comes with an Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics card. (By all accounts, it's better than previous generations of Nvidia’s XX60 cards, and roughly on par with competing cards in its price bracket, like AMD’s Radeon RX 7600.) Nvidia still has the edge when it comes to high-end features like ray-tracing. If you’re keen to play games that make use of it, then the RTX line is the way to go.

Photograph: WIRED

I used the Maingear MG-1 to play a lot of Bethesda’s Starfield–which, despite being a power hog, does not support ray-tracing–as well as the latest update to Cyberpunk 2077, which does. Both held up surprisingly well. After playing on the 3090 Ti in my main desktop, and even the 4070 laptop GPU in the Razer Blade 14, I expected the 4060 to be a mild step down, but I played both games with minimal issues.

Starfield struggled the most, though. With settings cranked to Ultra, at 1080p, I was able to consistently hit 30 frames per second, though the game started to slog a bit in crowded areas, like cities. Updates since the game’s release have improved performance a bit, but if you’re hoping to use brute force to overcome some less-than-optimized games, you might at least want to step up to the MG-1 Platinum, which comes with an Nvidia RTX 4070.

While playing Cyberpunk 2077, I was able to crank the graphics settings as high as they would go—including using the ray-tracing features, which look incredible—at 1440p (while testing a different display), but the system still often struggled to break 50 fps. When I went back to my 1080p monitor, I was able to turn the ray-tracing features back on and consistently hit 60 fps.

Beyond that, though, the MG-1 is mercifully well tuned. There’s almost no bloatware installed. It's mostly Microsoft's own apps that all Windows PCs come with, like Office apps.

The convenience of prebuilt PCs can sometimes come at the expense of upgradeability, but Maingear has thankfully made it pretty easy to swap out parts and upgrade components. The glass panel on the side is secured by two thumb screws that easily come off. A second panel on the opposite side can be removed to handle cable management underneath the motherboard.

Nearly everything in the PC is accessible from the main compartment, with the exception of the power supply. That is siloed in a smaller compartment at the base of the tower, with power cables extending from a few holes to run to the motherboard where needed. This is also the space where HDDs will be mounted if you add them during customization. However, if you want to add drives later, you’ll need to get the brackets they mount to, as they don’t come with the PC without a drive.

Of course, it’s worth noting how much you can customize the PC before you even get it. Maingear’s Live 3D Configurator lets you swap out parts, add upgrades, and change the RGB color to see what it will look like with different aesthetics. You can even upload your custom art for the front panel to preview what it will look like when printed.

The configurator displays your preferences in a 3D viewport that you can orbit and zoom in on, and it’s surprisingly detailed. When adding an HDD, for example, it not only adds the drive and the brackets, but even adds the cable running to the SATA port exactly where it will be when it arrives. You can get more information here about your build than I’ve ever seen in any other PC builder.

The 3D configurator also checks compatibility for all the parts you've chosen, so you can't accidentally end up building a custom rig that doesn't work. For example, when I selected the RTX 4090 graphics card, which would require much more power to run, the configurator lit up with bright yellow warnings telling me to choose a stronger power supply before I could add the PC to my cart.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed using the Maingear MG-1 Silver. It's worth noting here that you could probably get a similar, more powerful rig for cheaper if you built it yourself, as I did, but it's still beefy enough to handle some of the most demanding games. Better still, it's one of the easiest ways to get a custom gaming rig without having to learn how to build one from scratch. You can pick from a few preset options, or choose which parts to upgrade in an easy-to-use interface, and it arrives fully assembled. All you have to do is plug it in and start gaming.