Maingear MG-1 review: Shroud’s PC is fit for an FPS king

Twitch star Michael ‘shroud’ Grzesiek revealed his special edition Maingear MG-1 back in 2022, and we’ve got our hands on it.

Back in November 2022, esports legend Shroud revealed that he has invested in PC manufacturer Maingear as a co-owner. Shroud becomes the latest Twitch star to invest in PC system integrators, following OTK’s Starforge Systems in 2022.

Shortly after the announcement of Shroud’s involvement with Maingear, the pair released a special edition Shroud-branded MG-1 PC. The system itself proudly displays the FPS king’s iconic logo on the front panel. But, is the build itself any good? We’ve put the “Legendary” configuration of the PC through its paces to see if it lives up to Shroud’s name.

Key Specs

• CPU: Intel Core i9-13900K
• Motherboard: MSI Pro Z790-A DDR5 WiFi
• CPU Cooler: Cooler Master ML360R AIO
• Ram: Kingston Fury RGB DDR5-5600MHz
• GPU: Nvidia RTX 4080 Founders Edition
• PSU: 850w EVGA Fully Modular
• Storage: 2TB Solidigm P44 M.2 NVMe SSD
• Operating System: Windows 11 Home
• Price: $3,899

Dexerto

Design

The Maingear MG-1 Shroud Edition PC isn’t the flashiest build we’ve ever seen, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a gorgeous bit of hardware.

We’re big fans of minimalistic branding, and Maingear has knocked it out of the park with a simple design on the MG-1’s case that features the company’s logo front and center. On the inside, Maingear has slapped its logo on the AIO pump and one side of all six of the included fans.

The build also features the Twitch star’s iconic logo on the front of the case, done by using their in-house printing service. Unless you’re taking off the magnetic front panel and throwing it around like a football, you’re not going to have any issues with damaging the logo, though it would have been nice to see a slightly more elegant solution.

Removing the front panel shows off the 360mm Cooler Master ML360R AIO’s radiator. Though, we would have loved to see a filter over it similar to our Corsair 4000D.

The build also features RGB on the edges of the side panel and also through the Maingear logo, which we think is a nice touch to the MG-1’s case design.

Outside of the front panel is fairly no-frills, with a glass panel opposite of a regular solid metal panel. For airflow, it features a single 120mm fan on the back with two 140mm fans on the top that go very well with the three fans hooked up to the CPU cooler.

Custom-printed front panels

One of the most unique aspects of Maingear is that they offer custom-printed front and side panels for the MG-1. Using their proprietary ‘Marc’ system, customers can upload their own designs when ordering to make their PC one of a kind.

Maingear included a Dexerto branded front panel for us to check out, and it’s definitely a snazzy customization option.

It does come at an added cost of $99, however, but we feel it’s a solid price to make your PC one of a kind.

Build Quality

The MG-1 case is slightly smaller than your average mid-tower, coming in at just over 16 inches deep. Considering the PC’s pedigree and Shroud’s name stuck onto it, Maingear appears to have spared no expense for the components. The PC houses a 360mm AIO, in addition to a powerful Founders Edition RTX 4080 in the case.

Tight fit aside, the build quality of this machine is absolutely top-notch. All the cables are neatly tucked away out of sight as they should be, with everything safely secured.

The MSI Z790 motherboard that Maingear chose for the PC offers a huge amount of connectivity for content creators, providing eight USB ports across USB 2.0, 3.0, and USB-C options.

Not to mention, it’s paired with the fully capable ‘K’ version of Intel’s latest i9 release, so you can even potentially overclock the CPU further if you ever needed to eke out more power later down the line.

One of the only complaints we have about the MG-1 is the use of the stock 12VHWPR cable that comes with the RTX 4080. This is fairly unsightly. The PC doesn’t push against the adapter too badly, but for $3,899 we’d have much rather preferred to see an ATX 3.0 power supply with no pesky adapters required.

Where many at-home builders just leave a rat’s nest of wires, Maingear has taken the time to neatly organize them in a way that gives experienced users the ability to swap out parts as needed without having to dig through a tangled mess.

It’s not perfect, though, as we would have loved to see the wires around the backside of the PSU tied up nearly. What your near $4000 purchase instead nets you are rogue fan splitters littering an open area.

We were pleasantly surprised at how well-built the system was, and considering that most people are never going to look at the business end of a PC case anyway, all of our gripes with the MG1 have been relatively minor.

Gaming Performance

Sporting a 13th-gen Raptor Lake Intel 13900K with an Nvidia RTX 4080 GPU is no joke, and our benchmarks on the MG-1 Shoud Edition prove that.

The RTX 4080 Founders Edition hasn’t changed too much since its release back in November. We’ve chosen Cyberpunk 2077 and Forza Horizon 5 to test out the 13900k paired with the RTX 4080.

In Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p we saw an impressive 178 FPS on average, perfect for the most popular 165hz monitors. After upping the resolution to 4k, FPS dropped to 113 on average which we consider to be very impressive.

Forza Horizon 5 doesn’t offer DLSS3 like Cyberpunk 2077 does, so we only saw 125 FPS on 1440p and a measly 41 FPS on 4k using the same extreme settings. We’d definitely recommend turning settings down a bit if you want to play at a higher resolution.

Game	Average FPS	Max FPS
Cyberpunk 2077 1440p (RT Ultra, DLSS Performance, Frame Generation, Reflex)	178 FPS	284 FPS
Cyberpunk 2077 4k (RT Ultra, DLSS performance, Frame Generation, Reflex)	113 FPS	144 FPS
Forza Horizon 5 1440p (Extreme, RT Ultra, Super Resolution)	125 FPS	239 FPS
Forza Horizon 5 4k (Extreme, RT Ultra, Super Resolution)	41 FPS	198 FPS

CPU performance

The Intel i9-13900K is a demanding chip, in terms of both power and thermal output. To put it through its paces, we used AIDA64 and Cinebench stress tests to get an idea of how well the MG-1’s case and AIO actually cool the monster CPU.

Test	Max Temp	Average Temp
AIDA64 (10 minutes, full load)	74c	62c
Cinebench R23 Multi Core (24883 score)	89c	69c
Cinebench R23 Single Core (866 score)	51c	47c

It appears that the CPU did thermal throttle during this rather extreme scenario. We achieved a peak of 4.2GHz on the chip before it throttled itself back down to 3.5Ghz after reaching 89 degrees. Though, since the 13900K is a monster of a chip, it’s likely that the only real way to make this any better would have been to use a bespoke water-cooling setup with multiple radiators.

Is it worth it?

When looking for your next PC, there are quite a few options across the industry. Maingear is providing prebuilt options with high-end parts and fantastic cable management for great value if you’re not looking to build your own rig. Sure, it will be more expensive than building it yourself, but for those less technically minded, you can rest assured that this PC is built well, with excellent performance and more.

For the price, quality, and warranty, the Maingear MG-1 is among the best options available.

The verdict – 4/5

If you’re not interested in building your own PC and instead want to buy a computer backed by a content creator that uses what he sells — you could do much worse than the Maingear MG-1 Shroud Edition PC.

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