It takes quite a lot to get me interested in a desktop gaming PC launch in the year of our lord 2026, not least given that we don't have a new generation of Nvidia GPUs to talk about, but Maingear has absolutely crushed it with its latest unveiling.
It's just taken the wraps off a pretty ruddy beautiful homage to 90s desktop towers that hides a potentially ludicrous amount of gaming power – the Retro98, which is a beige throwback that many of us will instantly feel recognition for.
The design is just so perfectly done, and so nostalgic for people like me who grew up on Age of Empires on this sort of yellowed tower, that I'm guessing people will queue up to get their hands on one. Maingear says it's meant to look like it was "pulled straight from a 1998 gaming setup", and it's right on the money.
The desktop tower is going to be an ultra-limited release, with only 38 units ever being produced, in total, and each one being hand-assembled by a single worker at Maingear's HQ. Despite that, it'll have some customisation options, not least the choice of anything from an RTX 5070 up to a stonking 5090.
If that makes you suspect this'll be a premium release, you'd be very much right, too. In its cheapest form, the Retro98 will still cost a whopping $2,499, but if you take up every single option that Maingear offers, you'll be looking at a frankly bananas $9,799.
Those who do want that nearly $10k PC will be fishing in an even more limited pool – these machines are labelled as "alpha" versions, and there will only be 6 made in total (with the remaining 32 machines being standard variants).
These won't be packing Intel's Panther Lake chips, either – all versions of the machine will instead go with AMD, starting from the Ryzen 9 9850X3D and going up to the 9950X3D.
That all means that this will be a retro machine to absolutely blitz through any gaming problem you throw at it – even the most unoptimised modern releases should fall beneath its feet.
There's no waiting list here, either, with the drop live as of today and available to order from Maingear directly. I'd expect it to sell out super quickly, even though its pricing does make it a bit of a novelty.
