Maingear Shifts Into High Gear With Maingear Shift PC

Custom-system builder Maingear Monday unveiled its Shift line of high-end tower PCs targeting both power gamers and power users with several enhancements to keep the systems running cool regardless of the load.

The Intel or EVGA motherboards used in the Maingear's new Shift PC are rotated 90 degrees from the standard PC layout in order to allow cool air to be brought in from the bottom of the chassis and pulled up over the components, with warm air coming out the top.

Maingear is also including a closed-loop water cooling system that allows the processor speed to be boosted to more than 4.0GHz, according to the Union, N.J.-based company.

That cooling technology is needed thanks to a choice of high-end components, including either the Intel i7 900 or Intel i7 800 series processors, ATI Radeon HD or Nvidia GeForce video cards, and up to either 8 GB or 24 GB of DDR3 memory.

Storagewise, the Maingear Shift PCs are no slouches, with the ability to mix up to six SATA hard drives or 12 SSDs inside the chassis. The drives are cooled by the down-to-up vertical airflow of the entire system.

The chassis itself is a full tower model, with a steel skeleton and a brushed aluminum exterior which the company said also contributes to the heat dissipation. Because of the motherboard rotation, the USB, FireWire, audio and multimedia memory ports are located on the top of the chassis for easy access and covered by a pop-up panel.

Maingear's Shift PCs come with Microsoft's new Windows 7 operating system, but no bloatware, which Maingear said improves performance by ensuring that no unwanted software is running or conflicting with users' applications.

The base model of the Maingear Shift PC is priced starting at $2,199.