Maingear’s New PC Came Out of a Time Machine

Maingear, maker of performance PCs, has released a new limited-edition PC that is sure to tickle the nostalgia muscle of gamers and creatives who got their computing feet wet in the 1990s. The new Retro98 tower looks like it was transported to 2026 through a time machine, but the inside is undeniably modern.

“This [computer] is for the gamers who swapped GPUs under the cover of darkness, begged for RAM upgrades for their birthday, and lived for LAN parties,” Maingear says.

While the Retro98 is definitely built with gamers in mind, as if often the case with gaming-oriented PCs, the machine should demolish a creative workflow. The liquid-cooled Retro98 has AMD’s new Risen 9 9850X3D (up to 9950X3D) CPU and Nvidia’s powerful GeForce RTX 5090 GPU. The machine uses Kingston FURY RAM and SSDs.

As is always the case with Maingear machines, the Retro98 PC is handbuilt and promises high-quality craftsmanship. Each unit is hand-assembled by a single master technician at Manger’s New Jersey headquarters. As the company says, “these aren’t slapped-together beige boxes.”

Maingear says every element of the PC’s design is a “love letter to the golden age of PC gaming,” and frankly, it’s hitting all the right notes for 90s-era gamers.

“This drop is for those of us who tore open the family PC just to install a 3DFX accelerator,” says Wallace Santos, Maingear CEO and founder. “Retro98 brings back that feeling of chasing every last frame, waiting for the dial tone to download driver updates, and building a system that could handle the most graphics-intense 32-bit games. Except this time, we built the one your younger self always dreamed of.”

The base Maingear Retro98, which includes an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 GPU, plus 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 2TB NVMe Gen4 SSD, is $2,499. A mid-tier option with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 is $3,499, while a model with the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D and GeForce RTX 5090 is $4,999.

Then there is the top-of-the-line model, the Retro98 Alpha. This open loop liquid cooled version has the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, custom Alphacool liquid cooling, 64GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 4TB NVMe Gen5 SSD. This beast of a machine, all housed inside a tower straight out of 1998, is $9,799. It is, as Maingear claims, “unapologetically overkill.”

All four tiers, including the base model, are equipped to crew through high-res video edits and, of course, Photoshop and Lightroom tasks.

This is a highly limited release, there are only 32 units plus six of the high-end Alpha units up fro tabs. Once they’re gone, that’s it. There will be no reruns.

Image credits: Maingear