Maingear reigns king when it comes to making an ordinary product seem extraordinary, and its heavy-handed attempt at all-in-ones is no exception. Dubbed the Alpha 34, Maingear has built an all-in-one desktop for the gamer, a highly customizable PC with a beautiful 3,840 x 1,440 pixel display to boot. Not to mention, like the name suggests, it’s spread out across 34 inches of enticingly curvy goodness.
Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately for your wallet, the Alpha 34 presents an outrageous set of configuration options, including but not limited to 8-core Extreme Edition and 18-core Xeon Intel CPUs, as well as Nvidia’s Titan X or 980Ti graphics cards or, for AMD loyalists, a Radeon R9 390X. Additional specs include 32GB of Kingston DDR4 RAM, and a Samsung 950 Pro M.2 NVME SSD, purportedly with a 2.5Gbps read speed.
Maingear’s Alpha 34 isn’t like other all-in-ones. Rather than shipping with soldered-in, irreplaceable mobile chips, it’s completely modular, like any other gaming PC. It allows for the installation of any full-size GPU, and in the chassis, a closed loop liquid cooling system can be found.
While the Alpha 34 looks to be a promising setup for gaming, Maingear is presenting its all-in-one PC as an entertainment center rather than your go-to Steam apparatus. Unfortunately, most TV shows are formatted for 16:9 displays, and the Alpha 34’s ultra wide format exhibits a 21:9 aspect ratio, which means standard widescreen movies will play with large black bars on either side of the video.
For $1,999, Maingear’s Alpha 34 isn’t totally unreasonable. That is, until you find out what the base model actually comes with. For that price, you can expect a Core i3 processor, a 1TB 7200rpm hard drive, and an AMD R7 360X. And that’s without a mouse, keyboard, webcam, and wireless networking included.
If you want the aforementioned Titan X with a liquid-cooled eight-core gaming PC and 1TB SSD, you’re looking at a rig priced upwards of $4,771. What’s more, you can get an Alpha 34 with an 18-core Xeon processor, 16GB of RAM, and an Nvidia Quadro K620 for the modest price of $7,704.
It comes suited in a black finish, but if you’re not a fan of the gritty gaming PC look, Maingear is willing to ship the Alpha 34 in a number of alternative colors — for yet an additional cost of $299 to $399.
