Gaming PCs these days have become works of art. Enthusiasts spend hundreds of dollars to customize their systems, and that's before even getting into the actual hardware that runs games.
I can attest — my current build is a beautiful mixture of glass, steel, and silicon that glows softly while I game. I love it, but it's a far cry from the PCs with which I grew up.
Some of my earliest PC gaming memories date back to about 1996. A childhood friend of mine had an older brother who was into PC gaming, and he had passed down a system to his siblings based around the infamous 386 CPU.
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I have no idea what else was in that PC, but it could run Sim City and Wolfenstein 3D. That was enough for us at the time. I can still clearly recall the look of that PC, with its yellowing beige panels, horizontal layout, disk slots on the front, and massive CRT monitor on top.
That old PC is what first popped into my head when I saw Maingear's new Retro95 custom build.
Maingear's new Retro95 custom gaming PC is a tribute to my childhood
Maingear says its Retro95 PC is "a 90s throwback with 2025 firepower," and I don't think I could put it better myself.
As Maingear suggests, it's a PC for my generation, born in the '80s, who are old enough to have started gaming by the mid-'90s.
A time when you'd load your PC into your mom's van and head to a LAN party with your friends; when games came on floppy disks and connecting to the internet disabled the phone line for everyone else in the house.
Maingear's CEO, Wallace Santos, says:
"This one is for the gamers who lugged CRTs to LAN parties, swapped out disks between levels, and got their gaming news from magazines. The Retro95 drop is our way of honoring the classic era of gaming, with a system that looks like the one you had as a kid, but runs like the monster you’d spec from MAINGEAR today."
Maingear has really captured the old-school styling. From the faux floppy disk drives (which hide modern I/O) on the front to the green status lights and massive power/reset buttons, the Retro95 looks like it's arrived straight out of a time portal.
This is a true "sleeper build," as Maingear has created customization options that would make any gamer who remembers the '90s weep.
Prices start at $1,599 for a baseline model, but Maingear says you can configure the Retro95 with up to an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, NVIDIA RTX 5080 GPU, 96GB of DDR5 RAM, and 8TB of M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD storage. Have some old disks lying around? You can pop a DVD drive into your configuration.
How does this level of performance hardware fare in an old-school case? Maingear solved that by plonking two massive Noctua fans on either end of the horizontal setup, which push air through the system like any modern PC.
It remains to be seen how well the cooling actually works, but Maingear isn't one to skimp on important aspects of its builds.
I recently reviewed Maingear's MG-1 pre-built gaming PC, handing it a Windows Central Best Award in the process. In my review, I noted that it's the next best thing to building your own system thanks to careful attention to detail and the use of industry standard parts.
And like the MG-1, Maingear says its Retro95 PCs are hand-built in New Jersey with the same standard one-year warranty that can be boosted to three years.
Even if you don't need a new gaming PC, I urge you to check out the Maingear Retro95 to see exactly what it's all about.
And if you are currently searching for a new PC without having to build your own, know that there is a limited number of Retro95 PCs available. If you want to get one, I'd suggest checking out sooner rather than later.
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