MAINGEAR’s MG-1 Platinum PC Performs Solid at 1440p

The PC market may be in a questionable position currently, but when you need a PC, you need a PC. Pre-builds are more abundant than ever, but also offer better quality than ever before. MAINGEAR isn’t a name you’re going to walk into a Best Buy or Micro Center and see, but this company has accomplished quite a bit without being in retail stores. This includes patenting rear motherboard connections and implementing its own branded parts to truly make its builds feel very particular in their designs. MAINGEAR has sent over one of its MG-1 Platinum setups with a few different upgrades for us to test.

What Does MAINGEAR Do Differently?

With an abundant amount of competition both in brick and mortar stores and online-only that doesn’t even include Amazon, what can be done to stand out? For one, parts are hand-picked and hand-assembled from scratch using MAINGEAR proprietary cases with the option to customize art if so desired. The test system that was sent over featured a magnetic panel with the Hardcore Gamer logo and a design on the front. The AIO cooler that is pre-installed in the case is also labeled as MAINGEAR with the logo in the middle of the pump. A one-year warranty is also included along with lifetime support in addition to it.

MAINGEAR cuts no corners as every part that’s in the system, outside of the parts with its own brand on it, is name-branded. Systems also come with the proper memory overclock in place for the best balance of stability and performance. Other manufacturers will not go in and enable XMP or EXPO by default or have the correct power settings in place. MAINGEAR created its own power setting within Windows to ensure performance is maximum straight out of the box. There’s zero bloatware (unless you’re one of those people who considers Windows 11 in general as bloatware).

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MAINGEAR also offers a boost mode to add more performance to a system. They clearly did this with this system that was shipped, but in comparison, it was more overkill. The specs on the test system are confusing, but for those looking to purchase, RAM and storage can be doubled and Windows 11 Pro will be installed. Boosting the system will increase the price $200 and electing to go with the customizable front panel, or selecting from a plethora of designs on the MAINGEAR ordering page, will add another $129, maximum.

Thoughts on the Test System Design

What was shipped for the MG-1 was a tempered glass side panel that features a light strip inside the case for RGB lighting along with an RGB exhaust fan, two exhaust fans at the top and the AIO radiator mounted to the front. This means the system is pulling air in through the front, passing through the radiator, and expelling heat out of the top and the rear. This is a mid-tower case where the power supply is hidden underneath it, so no air can be filtered through the bottom from within the case. The top of the case features multiple holes for air passage, but no type of mess protection. The front doesn’t offer mesh protection either, as the air is pulled from a crevice around the exterior of the magnetic front cover that also lights up.

The real main issue is the fact that this case just feels dated. We reviewed a MAINGEAR Vybe back in both 2020 and 2021 as it featured some of the same things that did fit better at that time. The RGB is all tied into one system and features a remote control like what is featured on furniture ordered from Amazon. Some of the colors aren’t the right colors and it is rather basic. Going back to those, however, there are gains with how the designers managed the interior setup of this MG-1. This also isn’t $3000 and would perform better than that one did, but that era involved PC gaming that was expensive to get into.

Half of the parts that are used here are from MSI, which is a solid selection for these products. The MSI Pro B850-P WiFi offers about six USB-A ports on the back, two USB-C and other general ports along with wireless network connections. The top of the case does house the front panel connections with two USB-A and one USB-C. The RAM included is TeamGroup T-Force DDR5 RAM at 6400Mhz, which MAINGEAR was able to get stable with 64 GB of RAM. The RAM also has its own RGB separate from the system’s, but TeamGroup doesn’t appear to have its own RGB software.

The main attractions that decide the decision of purchasing or even building a PC are the processor and the video card. The MAINGEAR MG-1 Platinum comes with an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D that includes 8 cores and 16 threads that boosts to 5.0 GHz speeds. The video card that’s included is the NVIDIA RTX 5070, which hasn’t been the most popular video card in an overall underwhelming release of cards from NVIDIA. This card appears to be the one card that can be purchased at MSRP, while others have tighter stock and increased prices. The card that’s included is also a Founder’s Edition card directly from NVIDIA.

The retail on the MG-1 Platinum is $2,049 and boosted it’s $2,249. This specific model with the options provided comes in at over $2,500, and this is a lot when including a last generation processor from AMD and a card that’s aimed at 1440p that requires assistance in new titles. Don’t worry, there are benchmarks below. Couple that price in with a design that feels dated plus a case that pushes heat out like a furnace from only two 120mm fans rather than at least adding 140mm since it would fit. Not that it would make much a difference having just two bigger fans, but at least the temperature of the equipment was more than sufficient. A PC Partpicker build was conducted with this system totaling out at $1,823.45 if one decided to build themselves. This includes nearly $140 for just Windows 11 Pro and doesn’t include taxes, so that would probably break even if you didn’t purchase Windows.

Competition around this price range does tend to include the latest AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and the RTX 5070 Ti. If you’re spending this much, you would be well off to start looking at RTX 5080 setups. On top of all of this, the RTX 50 Series Super cards are being rumored to launch. While the cards might be hard to get, the pre-builds won’t be at that point.

It really currently comes down to the state of the GPU and CPU market. RAM is cheaper than ever to the point that it’s being given away in some circumstances. There’s also the AMD side of things with an impressive card in the 9070 XT that rivals the RTX 5080. This is just one setup from MAINGEAR. They do have many other builds with these same parts.

Benchmarks and Testing the MG-1

There were three setups that would be used for benchmarking, with one of them being an overclock of the GPU. It has been discovered that NVIDIA did leave a lot of performance on the table, and while the RTX 5070 didn’t get overclocked (and frankly not sure if that voids a warranty), the difference between the benched RTX 5080 with and without an overclock can give you an idea of the possible gains. The GPU on the MG-1 peaked at 82 degrees celsius less than a handful of times. Most times during benchmarking, it would sit right at 80. The CPU peaked at 60 degrees, but the amount of heat that was forced out of the system was tremendous.

While the test bench PC has a better video card, it has a lesser processor. This offers an Intel i7-12700K with an AIO 360 Cooler from NZXT mounted at the top of the case. While one is going to be a clear winner at 4K, the MG-1 does show that 4K gaming is more than capable in most instances. This setup, however, should be aimed at 1440p. It’s a bit much for 1080p gaming, so the sweet spot in the competition will come at 1440p. Those looking to do competitive gaming at 1440p as opposed to 1080p may want to take notice.

The games that were tested in the benchmark were Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Cyberpunk 2077, Forza Motorsport, Forza Horizon 5 and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. These were all benchmarked at 4K with various settings, same with 1440p, and 1080p was tested specifically with Tiny Tina. 3DMark benchmarks that were completed include Timespy Extreme, Timespy, Firestrike Extreme, Port Royal and Steel Nomad. A run on Cinebench was also run for multicore, and Heaven benchmarks were completed at both 4K and 1440p.

Games Tested for Benchmark

• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty
• Forza Motorsport
• Forza Horizon 5
• Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands

Benchmark Tools Tested for Benchmark

• 3DMark Timespy
• 3DMark Timespy Extreme
• 3DMark Firestrike Extreme
• 3DMark Port Royal
• 3DMark Steel Nomad
• Cinebench 2024
• Heaven

Starting with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, this demanding Unreal Engine 5 title will test what these systems do with the most modern, demanding title. A custom benchmark was tested in Lumiere, a section with the most people, effects and density in the game. 4K DLSS Performance is doable on the MAINGEAR MG-1 with its setup while DLSS Quality is somewhat playable. TSR Epic settings would get a console-like experience. The system handles 1440p somewhat better, but still requires DLSS to hit 60 FPS.

Cyberpunk 2077 was tested with TAA, DLSS Quality, ray tracing medium and overdrive with various DLSS settings. The MG-1 system does a solid job in 4K with DLSS on quality, but ray tracing is looking like a console experience. This was the benchmark tool within the game, so certain areas will be much more demanding than others in real time. 1440p resolution is the definitive way to play the game on the MG-1 system. The Test Bench and Overclock are getting around 40% performance increase, which goes back to what was stated about potentially looking at an RTX 5080 system even if it costs $500 more.

Forza Motorsport dropped a few years ago, but still remains demanding in terms of hardware. Turn 10 Studios added ray tracing at one point, and the overall performance has improved since the initial release. Now, if you are looking to build a racing simulator and just want everything in one box, the MG-1 will serve well. The graphical settings are difficult and it wants to optimize everything based on the frame rate desired. The Overclock Bench gets 10 FPS more than the Test Bench at 4K, which is about 25 FPS more than the MG-1. One has to wonder if the RTX 5070 would get closer to 110 with an OC. 1440p does get the same frame rate in TAA with no ray tracing as the Test Bench.

Going back, it’s hard to believe Forza Horizon 5 is almost five years old. Many will claim that it looks better than Forza Motorsport and it runs better. It really is well optimized and ray tracing was also added to this in recent times. The game can’t average 100 frames without DLSS, but did peak at 120 during the run in 4K. The best settings for this game are in 1440p with ray tracing extreme averaging 143 FPS. The Test bench was simply overkill in 1440p for this game.

Tiny Tina’s Wonderland allows these systems to hold nothing back. This was benchmarked in three different resolutions to somewhat provide the idea of what a competitive shooting experience would be with the MG-1. The system provided an improvement over the console experience, but suffered without FSR on in 4K. 1440p is still the sweet spot, especially if there’s an 144hz monitor involved. 1080p did have the system peak at 250 FPS while averaging 192. The MG-1 still lost out to the test bench on this game at the lower resolutions, but it was within single digits.

The benchmark tools tell a different story on one of the outcomes that actually shows that AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D being better. This was the best gaming processor to have for a minute. Even at 1440p, the RTX 5070 was still utilized between 98-100% of the time and not really allowing the processor to do much. This should be more balanced. 3DMark Firestrike had the MG-1 take the overall score ahead of the test benches. There’s also an original test bench in here that included a RTX 3080 10GB original version. The rest of the PC specs are the same as the test bench and no overclock was used on those runs.

Heaven and Cinebench are the two other benchmarks that were completed. Heaven always seems to tell the real story with its benchmarks, while Cinebench is more of a stress on the CPU to see where it sits in the market in terms of performance. Heaven was run in both 4K and 1440p and the MG-1 didn’t fare too well in 4K. One would think with this setup that 1440p would have faired better against a two-generation old Intel CPU, but the RAM is doubled on the Test Bench, albeit slower.

Closing Comments:

People tend to say to wait in the PC community before making a larger purchase. The thing is that these products don’t really ever come down in price like a traditional market would, and instead just disappear and immediately get replaced with something else. When the RTX 40 Super Series hit, gains were made from the original cards for the same price. The RTX 50 Super Series rumors are heating up and could be here in the Fall, complete with new pre-builds that MAINGEAR will probably have. With the MG-1 Platinum, this series almost feels like a parts PC, meaning made of extra things in the warehouse they put together in a package and sold as a unit. It would be more welcoming if they had opted to include the latest AMD Ryzen CPU’s as other competitors have in the same price range as this. It’s also a strange mix of CPU and GPU as can be seen with the benchmarks. Somehow the system relies mostly on the GPU, but it’s not that powerful of a GPU, yet the processor was the best for gaming in the past generation.

If looking for 1080p gaming or competitive gaming, this setup is too much. On the opposite end, it doesn’t do enough for high frame rate 1440p gaming when comparing with the Test Bench. If this system was closer to $1500, it would be understandable. The dated esthetics and the potential updates to the current hardware included means this $2000-$2500 computer could be obsolete much sooner than in the past. The customizable front cover is a nice option to have, but it’s going to cost you. MAINGEAR offering the boosts are a nice touch too, but again are going to cost you. In terms of the pre-build market, some of the competition offers something a bit different or more in terms of hardware for around the same price, but this setup does fit around that price range. It’s just up to the consumer if they can justify this much being spent. This is still a better deal than anything that was sold between 2020 and 2022. If you’re going to spend this much money, it would be worth it to spend a bit more and get something with a better GPU, or even step down a tier to save some money and get something with the latest AMD GPUs to give similar, if not better, performance.