I haven’t written about this yet, which surprises no one more than myself, but early in 2024 I upgraded my PC.

My M.O. in the past has been to build them myself. I tend to get the best motherboard I can at the time, skimp a little on the processor in order to allow myself to get an upgrade in the future, take the middle-road in terms of RAM amount for the same reason, and to get a reasonably performing video card. This usually saves me some money by not going after the Best of the Best, and this strategy allows me to go for a little less than a decade without a wholesale refresh.

My last system sported an MSI motherboard with an I7-7700k processor and 32GB of RAM. I had upgraded the video card to an RTX 3070 from a 1070Ti, but I am ashamed to admit that I did so during the point where video cards were at an absolute premium and were almost impossible to find. I managed to snag the 3070 by getting on alert lists and having my number pulled for a reservation. I paid way more than I should have but I justified by telling myself that this was the only upgrade I had actually done since I first built the machine.

That PC served me well for about 8 years, but I had been in negotiations with my wife who informed me that I had never actually used my annual bonus for anything, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to use it on a new PC since I had been making overtures along those lines for a few months. My 7700k was still running pretty well, although the fans were insanely loud, and since my daughter was gearing up to leave college and return to the home area, the plan was to give her the old system and for me to buy a new one.

The Search is On

At this point in my life I have nothing to prove to anyone, and while I flirted with the idea of buying parts and going through the nth PC build of my life, I opted not to. I had only ever bought off the shelf once before — an Alienware which contrary to popular air-quote discourse air-quote was a rock solid machine for the 10 years or so that I had it — so I had to do some research into which companies “made” good PC builds these days. I say “research” as if I didn’t take the recommendation of a friend, another long-term PC builder who has gotten too old for that shit, and went with the same company he did: Maingear.

With the bonus in hand, I went to their site and configured a “pre-built”, because even the act of having to pick items from lists was beyond my ability to care. I figured that if I were going to pick parts for someone else to build, I might as well look at what they already had pre-configured in the name of expediency, and opted for the MG-1 line. Because I could, I went with the “Ultimate” tier…and then chose the “boosted” option. Now, if you’ve gone to the Maingear website, pulled up the Ultimate Boosted MG-1 on the site, and saw the price, I wouldn’t blame you for laughing your ass off. The same system could be built for less money, and I tried to do so by using PC Part Picker, Micro Center, NewEgg, and other services, but the results at the time weren’t that much less than what Maingear was asking…plus, considering how long I keep these machines, and the fact that I had to consider that I was paying for someone else to do the work for me while I lounge around and wait…I was OK with the price.

At the end of the day, here’s the specs:

• Intel I9-14900KS, which was an unexpected upgrade as I had only paid for the K, so I did get a little something for free, considering the KS had come onto the market while my order was pending.
• 64 GB RAM, for everything.
• RTX 4090 Founders, since I’d heard that the ’90’s editions did well with things like 3D modeling and other applications, but figured it should help out a little with gaming as well, I guess.
• 4TB M.2 since I didn’t take any of my SSDs from my old system when I gave it to my daughter, and games take up a lot of space.
• AsRock Z790 Nova motherboard which has a lot of lights on it. A lot of lights.
• Maingear’s own AiO liquid cooler for the processor.
• 1200w PSU because of course it is.
• A Very Nice Case in which the Maingear folks added some LED lighting strips, so now I light my entire office just with the illumination from inside the case.

I won’t downplay the results: this thing screams. Not literally; it’s mostly quiet even under load. I haven’t run any official benchmarks, but my personal benchmark — Star Citizen — runs like a real goddamn game now with no stuttering. I even turned the clouds on and boy howdy is it worth it! I was getting around 70-80 fps in normally lag-ridden zones like Loreville, and when I was flying alone out in space, I had reached 100 fps, and occasionally a bit over.

A Wee Bit Of Concern

Nothing in my life goes smoothly, as I am sure you can relate. It was recently discovered that there was something rotten with certain editions of Intel’s 13th and 14th gen processors. I’m not a computer scientist, but I think it had something to do with the voltage regulation basically frying the chips, which sounds like a logical situation except that CPUs have been capable of overclocking for decades now, with only the most egregious increases destroying hardware. Intel pointed the finger at motherboard manufacturers who redirected the finger at Intel.

Well, turns out that Intel blinked and issued a mea culpa. A patch is inbound sometime in August for processors which have not yet been damaged, so yay me (not that I overclock). For those who have been affected, Intel has extended an extra two years under certain conditions which may or probably may not help some folks.

The Verge contacted a bunch of PC manufacturers and builders to find out if they would be honoring Intel’s extension, not, or would be going with something else. I breathed a sigh of relief when I got the response from Maingear.

Re: Maingear

So yeah, dang. I don’t feel bad at all about paying what I did for this machine. In fact, dealing with Maingear has been pretty good overall, but not 5-stars.

After I placed my order, I was told that my off-the-shelf PC would ship in about 1-2 business days. Good: after all, that’s one of the reasons I chose an off-the-shelf PC.

That 1-2 day window closed, and then a 7 day window closed, and then a 3 week window, a 1 month window, and a month and a half window. I was getting kind of concerned so I wrote to them to ask about it and they sent back a nice response saying that they had run into a parts shortage — specifically the liquid cooler — and they were expecting a refresh the next week so I should expect to get a shipping notice in about 4-6 days. Wonderful! Except that didn’t happen. It was another 2 or 3 weeks before I got my notification, and I had to bug them again in order to get it I had confidence that I’d get my machine since Maingear has been around for a while and no company does that if they have a habit of screwing people over (hi Google!), but I was a bit miffed that I was not kept in the loop about the inventory backlog. So if anyone from Maingear is reading this: try and do better.

Maybe for my troubles I did get the kick-up to the brand-spankin’ new KS processor variant which wouldn’t have cost me more had I actually ordered it, but it was a nice-to-see surprise when I finally unboxed and looked over the specs.

In the process of preparing my BIOS for the impending Intel patch, though, I inadvertently reset the fan settings that the Maingear techs had applied to keep the machine cool but also whisper quiet. I took a shot and emailed them asking if they could send me the values, thinking that I’d get a “sorry but that’s our industry leading secret!” or some BS like that, but no…they sent me a whole missive about how to set up the fans in the BIOS, complete with images. So that was really nice! Even though they weren’t proactive about keeping me in the loop about the shipping delays, they have been nothing but Princes and Princesses when it came to contacting them with questions and concerns.

I’d buy from Maingear again, to be certain, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be upgrading my current PC in the future. By the time this system reaches it’s retirement age, I might only be operational for tablet games, but we’ll see how things suss out when we get there.