Maingear’s Vybe desktop is ‘soft on the wallet,’ Nomad and Pulse get updated

System builder Maingear made a couple of announcements on Thursday, the first of which was the launch of its new Vybe high-end desktop. Not only is this system optimized for VR and PC gaming, the company says Vybe is “soft on the wallet” with a starting price of just $1,000. This desktop is fully customizable, of course, because that’s the nature of Maingear’s business model. But you have to be careful with that shopping cart, as all those added hardware treats could fatten up the final bill to a surprising extent.

The Vybe desktop is actually served up in two base flavors: one based on the Intel H110 or Z170 chipset ($1,000), and one based on the X99 chipset ($1,600). The former configuration offers options for Intel’s four-core Skylake processors while the latter configuration supports Intel’s meatier six-to-ten-core Broadwell-E processors. Check them out:

Here are the rest of the hardware goodies provided in the default configurations:

Both desktops provide plenty of options to fit your PC gaming and VR needs. There are actually three more bays for installing hard drives or solid state disks in RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5 configurations. A wireless component can be thrown in for an additional price along with special chassis lighting, enhanced thermal interface material, Maingear’s overclocking service, and so on.

Note that both models provide graphics card options extending up to two of Nvidia’s latest GeForce GTX Titan X cards in SLI mode for an additional $2,876.  If you’d rather play on Team AMD, two Radeon RX 480 cards (8GB each) in CrossFire mode cost $430 while two Radeon R9 Nano cards (4GB each) in CrossFire mode cost $1,139.

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As for the second announcement Maingear made on Thursday, the company said that its Nomad and Pulse PC gaming notebooks now serve up options for Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1080, GTX 1070, and GTX 1060 graphics cards by default. The Nomad 17 model has a starting price of $2,400 and the Pulse 15 has a starting price of $2,150. Here are the default specs of each:

Note that the Nomad 17 model provides only two graphics options: the default GTX 1070 8GB and the GTX 1080 8GB version for an added $515 on the final bill. However, the Pulse 15 model only serves up the default GeForce GTX 1060 6GB option.