MAINGEAR is jumping on the retro train as well, with its new Retro98 today. This is a new desktop that looks like it’s from 1998, but it has 2026 specs. This is a limited-edition gaming PC “inspired by the rigs that sparked our obsession with gaming”.
The company says that it is built around the SilverStone FLP02 tower PC case, and it is “for gamers who swapped GPUs under the cover of darkness, begged for RAM upgrades for their birthday, and lived for LAN parties.”
Retro98 has the beige look of PCs from the ’90s, but that doesn’t mean it’s old. It’s an “unapologetically over-the-top liquid-cooled rig co-developered with Alphacool, Retro98 is packed with today’s most elite components: the newly announced AMD Ryzen 9 9850X3D, graphics up to the GeForce RTX 5090, ultra-fast Kingston FURY RAM, and SSDs.”
MAINGEAR also notes that each Retro98 system is hand-assembled by a single master technician at MAINGEAR HQ in New Jersey. It’s also tested like the rig is being kept for themselves.
The MAINGEAR Retro98 configs are insane
The Retro98 starts at $2,499 and goes all the way up to $4,999. There’s even a Retro98a that is an open-loop liquid-cooled rig that will cost you $9,799. Which MAINGEAR says is “unapologetically overkill”.
So the base model for $2,499 will get you the Intel Core Ultra 7 256K, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070, 32GB of Kingston FURY Beast DDR5 RAM, 2TB NVMe Gen4 SSD, and the MSI Z890 Gaming Plus WiFi motherboard.
If you want to go AMD, you’ll have to spend $3,499, which will get you the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, along with the GeForce RTX 5080. And if you want to max out the graphics for the GeForce RTX 5090 , that one will cost you $4,999.
This is going to be an extremely limited edition. Only 32 units, plus six Alpha units. MAINGEAR says “no reruns. period.” It’s available today from MAINGEAR’s website .
