There’s something special about building a PC by hand. I still have fond memories of my first tower. But we have to face facts: Some people don’t have the time or patience to identify all the parts they need and then the know-how to put them all together. Custom PC maker Maingear has been in the game for years, and judging by its MG-1, the company knows what the PC gamer crowd wants: customizability, high-quality parts, and lots and lots of RGB.
Maingear handed me their MG-1 Legendary desktop with a special surprise in the box. The company included a flat panel with a military-style green and black pattern for our review unit and Gizmodo’s logo emblazoned on the front. A custom front panel normally costs $100 extra.
Yes, it was a way to butter us up before we spent time on their product, but at the very least, it also offers a glimpse of Maingear’s philosophy with the MG-1. It’s a typical mid-size desktop case in most ways that matter. The parts glow with all the milky RGB lighting you could want once it’s running, but it easily fits on or underneath your desktop. That customizable, removable front plate is like the cherry on top of a thick vanilla ice cream cone. It’s a good thing for Maingear that vanilla is my favorite flavor.
Maingear MG-1 Legendary
The Maingear MG-1 is a solid build from a company that obviously knows what it’s doing. The Legendary can handle pretty much any game you throw at it.
Pros
- Excellent build quality and cable management
- Beautiful, customizable front plate
- Quiet even under stress
Cons
- LED light strips feel too DIY for a professional build
The benefit of a prebuilt system is that Maingear knows the parts work together and that they fit within its jazzed-up case with a custom AiO CPU cooler. It looks good, especially the liquid cooling apparatus and infinity mirror. When you open it up, you’ll find two RGB LED strips running along the bottom compartment and the side near the front fans. You don’t notice it unless you’re staring down at the glass side panel from above. If the PC sits on your desk, you don’t have to care. If it’s near your feet, those LED strips look too DIY for the added price of a pre-built PC.
My version of the MG-1 came with 2 TB of SSD storage, an Intel Core i9-14900K, 32 GB of RAM, and a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super. It will cost under $3,400 if you select all the parts from Maingear’s website. That is a hefty price, but it is not out of line, considering the RTX 4080 Super is around $1,000. The Intel Core i9 might come in a little less than $500. It’s the cost of convenience, but there are extra benefits to buying a PC with custom parts. The pros at Maingear have such solid cable management it puts any of my past attempts to shame.
The modern version of the MG-1 Legendary without any customization starts at $2,700, less than the price of the Alienware Aurora R16 with comparative specs and performance. It’s a more upgradable PC with two spare RAM slots and some spare PCI-e slots.
The company also offers new versions of its lineup containing AMD’s latest Ryzen 7 and 9 CPUs. When making a purchase, you’re cementing your allegiance to the AMD or Intel ecosystem, but given that systems like the MG-1 Legendary start at $2,800 with what is ostensibly a solid chip, it’s worth serious consideration compared to the Intel variety.
Maingear MG-1 Review: Build Quality
Maingear made a point of telling me they wanted to offer as much as a standardized Windows 11 experience with their PC. It’s packing quite a few parts from MSI, and if you’re not careful, you may accidentally reinstall all the missing bloatware you intended to keep off your PC. If you’re like me, and you test a lot of products at once, such as Razer’s big glowy mousepad, Blackwidow keyboard, and more, it’s not long before your PC is full to the gills of apps that want to launch on startup.
As I mentioned before, I enjoy all the RGB flooding the cavity of the MG-1, save for the single LED light strip running along the bottom. It would look much cleaner to diffuse the light with a single piece of opaque plastic. Otherwise, my favorite added doohickey is the CPU liquid cooler unit with the slick infinity mirror effect. It clicks with MSI’s motherboard to offer a clean-looking interior that doesn’t try to pretend it’s not a PC.
The side panel is held together by four thumb screws that take a little longer to remove than I’m used to with most custom cases. The side panel then slides back and out, revealing those annoying LED strips and the custom mounting bracket for the GPU. The mount is made out of 3D-printed plastic, but that 4080 Super is mounted so securely it doesn’t even wiggle after tugging at it. The downside is you would need to remove the front panel completely to access the screws keeping the graphics card in place.
Despite that, the PC is well put together. I removed the backplate and found superb cable management that kept every wire secure while delineating where each goes. And you have to give Maingear props for its customizable front plate. It locks in with several magnets and stays secure despite accidental knocks or shudders.
This beast is quiet, for the most part. The fan systems don’t tend to buzz with helicopter strength, even when under stress. At most, it’s a low growl that only made my coworkers working at the desks around me glance up with curiosity rather than annoyance.
Maingear MG-1 Review: Performance
The Legendary is a system made for high-performance gaming. I didn’t have to tell you that, did I? Look at the specs; you can already tell this system manages just fine, going up to 4K native without upscaling with the highest possible settings on multiple demanding games. No, it won’t grant you the very edge of what’s possible on a PC without a RTX 4090, but it should be more than enough.
I played and benchmarked multiple games at 4K resolution. The Intel Core i9-1400K is a hefty CPU, though it still may not be as top-tier as the latest AMD Ryzen 7 7800x3D that you get in the most recent version of the MG-1 Legendary. The 4080 Super and the CPU together are enough to help you hit 60 FPS or more at 4K or ultrawide (3440 by 1400) resolutions.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be compromises. With a ray tracing set to ultra, I can hit 50 FPS on Cyberpunk 2077 benchmarks at sub-4K without any upscaling or frame generation, but when I added the DLSS quality set to automatic, I was pushing past 100 FPS. At 4K resolution, you’ll need the extra boost from DLSS to reach 60 with all the ray tracing trimmings and settings at high or ultra.
It’s a similar scenario in other games I tested. Horizon: Forbidden West ran smoothly as butter, and Black Myth Wukong was no match, even when I turned off the upscaling. A game like Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 needs the extra upscaling help at 4K with all the settings set to their max, but even when I relied on the native, it wasn’t dipping below 49 FPS even as the Tyrranids were swarming all over.
The CPU in my review unit is no longer what you get with the MG-1 Legendary unless you build it yourself. Still, the Intel Core i9-14900K is a solid processor for a machine of this type. It still beats the Intel Core i9-14900KF in single-core and multi-core CPU benchmarks with Geekbench and Cinebench. The 14th-gen Intel CPUs are under intense scrutiny for their recent instability issues, so it’s fair enough to want to stay away until Intel finally confirms everything is ship shape.
Maingear MG-1 Review: Verdict
When you look straight on, the MG-1 is a sleek, effective PC that leaves enough room for future customization. You may want to grab some piece of translucent quarter pipe to make the LED strips vibe more with the entire design, but that’s a niggling issue for such a solid build.
There’s not much spare space, and the size might constrain you if you ever want more than two SSDs on the motherboard. I’d also be wary of future Nvidia RTX 50-series releases, as we still don’t know how big they might get. At the very least, the motherboard supports gen-5 PCI-e slots for future, potentially monstrous GPUs.
But at this point, there’s not a single game you can’t play on the MG-1 Legendary’s specs. It’s a solid machine that won’t need much upgrades for years on, save for the standard TLC a PC deserves. The customizable front panel offers just the right amount of flair. The MG-1 may seem humble, but that’s only because it knows it doesn’t need to compete.
