Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X are shaping up to be impressive consoles, but they lack the flexibility of a gaming PC, which in turn tend to be a lot less compact than Sony or Microsoft’s machines. This is where Maingear comes in.
The PC hardware firm has taken the covers off its new Turbo compact PC, a dinky desktop that comes packing AMD’s latest Ryzen 3000XT processors and the latest graphics cards. Maingear claims the desktop is so compact, it takes up as much space as a shoebox.
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At a width of 6.7 inches and a depth of 14.4 inches, we can well believe it, though its 12.3-inch height means it’s certainly taller than the average shoebox. But given the system can support graphics cards up to Nivida’s mighty Titan RTX, the dimensions of the Turbo PC are pretty impressive.
We could well imagine it sitting behind a TV or neatly to one side of an entertainment system, ready to deliver both current and next-generation gaming. And thanks to options for a 12-core Ryzen 9 3900XT CPU, AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 XT or one of Nvidia’s powerful GeForce RTX graphics cards, as well as up to 64GB of RAM and a frankly vast 16TB of storage space, Maingear’s compact computer has a spec that could trounce the next-generation consoles.
Fitting such a spec inside a small chassis has meant Miangear needed to use its Apex liquid cooling system and orientate the setup so that cool air is sucked in from the bottom of the machine and vented out the top, not unlike the Xbox Series X. Custom tubing and the use of a quiet pump ensures the water cooling system can keep powerful components from melting down while also ensuring that fan noise doesn’t become excessive. That seems handy if you plan to connect such a machine to a TV rather than pop it under a desk.
All this compact design doesn’t exactly come cheap, with a Turbo model that targets 1080p starting at $1,699; there’s a reason why gaming consoles are so popular compared to even the best gaming PCs. But for the price, you are getting a well-specced machine that’ll handle all current and near-future games, as well as handle intensive work tasks such as video rendering or CAD jobs. That's not something a PS5 can do.
Nvidia is poised to reveal the GeForce RTX 3080 and other next-generation graphics cards soon, and AMD is seemingly prepping a killer GPU for September. So the coming months are set to be just as interesting for PC gaming as they are for Xbox and PlayStation.