Maingear unveils Core i7-packin' SHIFT, your own 'personal supercomputer'
By Darren Murph 
posted Nov 2nd 2009 9:00AM
posted Nov 2nd 2009 9:00AM
MAINGEAR Unleashes a Paradigm SHIFT in High Performance Computing
"SHIFT" personal supercomputer redefines computing performance, design, and support
System highlights include elegant design, advanced cooling, maximum expandability, and angelic customer support
Union, New Jersey – November 2, 2009 – MAINGEAR Computers, award-winning builders of custom computers for PC gamers and enthusiasts, unveils SHIFT, the everyday supercomputer that will reshape the current landscape of high performance computing. SHIFT rethinks the status quo of the high end PC industry with rigs that often feature an array of plastic, bling, and commoditized components and offers every day supercomputing in a sophisticated design with sublime, elegant lines, unmatched performance, optimal airflow, and limitless upgradeability. By harnessing the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU), the SHIFT can speed up everyday tasks like photo and video editing, transcoding videos for portable media devices, and upscaling standard definition video.
"The SHIFT bucks the trend of plastic, bloated, commodity PCs. It's a statement of our commitment to performance, reliability, and support." said Wallace Santos, CEO and Founder of MAINGEAR. "Featuring vertical airflow, all the cooling necessary for today's high performance, and backed by the best technical support team in the business, MAINGEAR is committed to maintaining our lead in the market. The SHIFT Personal Supercomputer is positioned to take advantage of all the next generation technology in GPGPU computing to greatly enhance the customer experience."
Elegant Design – Shift's aluminum skin provides clean, elegant lines while housing a tank-like steel skeleton. Devoid of unnecessary bling, Shift was crafted to add an element of sophistication and simplicity to any room in the house.
Advanced Cooling – Shift employs a unique approach to cooling with bottom to top airflow, aggressive liquid cooling, and a 90 degree rotation of the motherboard.
Expansion – MAINGEAR's forward thinking, design includes features including user accessible expansion slots, full eATX motherboard support, full sized 5.25" optical drives, multiple SATA hard drive configurations, and up to 2 2.5" HDD in each 3.5" HDD Drive bay.
Angelic Support – In an industry often characterized by poor customer support, MAINGEAR goes against the grain and offers world class support for each of its systems. Should any issues arise, each SHIFT owner is able to talk directly to the builder that assembled their system and can take advantage of virtual on-site support through an internal remote-desktop setup with privacy guarantees. Additionally, MAINGEAR offers on-site support should the situation warrant it.
"Customer service is paramount at MAINGEAR." said Chris Morley, CTO. "Angelic Service is our premium blend of pre- and post-sales support including non-commissioned sales, US-based, in house technical support, virtual on-site remote diagnostic technology, and on-site support solutions. We're delivering the total package."
MAINGEAR will also be unveiling a version of the SHIFT geared specifically towards creative professionals, video production, audio editing, and CAD before the end of the year. Consumers can purchase the Shift at MAINGEAR's Web site www.maingear.com or order by phone at (888-MAINGEAR). The base price for the Shift is $2,199 and comes with MAINGEAR's premium Lifetime Labor and Phone Support with 3 year hardware warranty and is backed by the best in-house support team in the country.
"SHIFT" personal supercomputer redefines computing performance, design, and support
System highlights include elegant design, advanced cooling, maximum expandability, and angelic customer support
Union, New Jersey – November 2, 2009 – MAINGEAR Computers, award-winning builders of custom computers for PC gamers and enthusiasts, unveils SHIFT, the everyday supercomputer that will reshape the current landscape of high performance computing. SHIFT rethinks the status quo of the high end PC industry with rigs that often feature an array of plastic, bling, and commoditized components and offers every day supercomputing in a sophisticated design with sublime, elegant lines, unmatched performance, optimal airflow, and limitless upgradeability. By harnessing the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU), the SHIFT can speed up everyday tasks like photo and video editing, transcoding videos for portable media devices, and upscaling standard definition video.
"The SHIFT bucks the trend of plastic, bloated, commodity PCs. It's a statement of our commitment to performance, reliability, and support." said Wallace Santos, CEO and Founder of MAINGEAR. "Featuring vertical airflow, all the cooling necessary for today's high performance, and backed by the best technical support team in the business, MAINGEAR is committed to maintaining our lead in the market. The SHIFT Personal Supercomputer is positioned to take advantage of all the next generation technology in GPGPU computing to greatly enhance the customer experience."
Elegant Design – Shift's aluminum skin provides clean, elegant lines while housing a tank-like steel skeleton. Devoid of unnecessary bling, Shift was crafted to add an element of sophistication and simplicity to any room in the house.
Advanced Cooling – Shift employs a unique approach to cooling with bottom to top airflow, aggressive liquid cooling, and a 90 degree rotation of the motherboard.
Expansion – MAINGEAR's forward thinking, design includes features including user accessible expansion slots, full eATX motherboard support, full sized 5.25" optical drives, multiple SATA hard drive configurations, and up to 2 2.5" HDD in each 3.5" HDD Drive bay.
Angelic Support – In an industry often characterized by poor customer support, MAINGEAR goes against the grain and offers world class support for each of its systems. Should any issues arise, each SHIFT owner is able to talk directly to the builder that assembled their system and can take advantage of virtual on-site support through an internal remote-desktop setup with privacy guarantees. Additionally, MAINGEAR offers on-site support should the situation warrant it.
"Customer service is paramount at MAINGEAR." said Chris Morley, CTO. "Angelic Service is our premium blend of pre- and post-sales support including non-commissioned sales, US-based, in house technical support, virtual on-site remote diagnostic technology, and on-site support solutions. We're delivering the total package."
MAINGEAR will also be unveiling a version of the SHIFT geared specifically towards creative professionals, video production, audio editing, and CAD before the end of the year. Consumers can purchase the Shift at MAINGEAR's Web site www.maingear.com or order by phone at (888-MAINGEAR). The base price for the Shift is $2,199 and comes with MAINGEAR's premium Lifetime Labor and Phone Support with 3 year hardware warranty and is backed by the best in-house support team in the country.
Do we even have to ask if this play crysis?
Nope, we don't have to mention it either. (-1)
This damn thing plays Crysis all by itself!
This IS Crysis.
Been waiting for engadget to post another product about maingear, I remember way back in July when the company claimed that they released "the world's most powerful gaming laptop" stuttering fans of Dell's alienware. This create a confusion to the customers.Now, they will be releasing another beast for desktop, a P55 gaming rig.. but I supposed, it's too early to tell if they will clamor it as the "most powerful desktop for gaming"
Crysis 2 here we come :)
I find it hard to get excited about this, it's no different to other high-end systems :P
Woo?
Especially since it's not even high-end. It's just a custom built PC you can build on your own from general supply parts. Nothing special, not even "sexy".
A high-end could be considered a quad CPU quad Core Xeon, 128GB ECC RAM, perhaps liquid cooled, 3 Quadros or top-of-the-line GeForces (or ATI for those who prefer), IoDrive + RAID-1 0 SSDs for the OS and a BD burner, of course.
Now that'd be a killer machine, but again, they wouldn't sell a single one to the pube-nerds with only pocket-money to spare + their college savings.
@loocas
That's not top of the line, that's overkill.
It'll look a lot uglier with a bunch of wires prodding out the top.
Well, if it's like the Silverstone Raven, it should have a cover that shields the cables coming out of the top.
wires on top? im pretty sure this is maingears first in-house pc case...
I have a Raven and it may be ugly, but it sure is sueful not to have to go in back for the connections all the time.
Form over function always wins in my book.
The case is definitely Silverstone's, check the logo on the ODD bay tabs, the hard drive bays look too much like the Raven's as does the lower back end of it. The vertical airflow arrangement is something Silverstone are used to...hell it was them who built the Voodoo Omen case:
http://www.thenextbench.com/t5/Desktops/Omen-Chassis-Build-Out/m-p/48020#M7957
Too bad this sux in comparison to the MacPro. Why does every other computer manufacturer not make a computer even 1/100 as beautiful as my beloved MacPro.
I think the modified Coolermaster Cosmos Case and Thermaltake Sword are some of the best cases I ever seen and are way more functional than the MacPro's case. But it's just my opinion so it clearly doesn't matter... =P
Because beauty is in the eye of the beholder and you have already shown your bias. I personally find over done, propriety configuration systems pretty hard on the eye. Sure you can hard drives, ram and some graphics cards. However, if anything else goes wrong with it you better pray to your Deity of choice that your Apple Care is still valid or you will find yourself with a very expensive repair or a very 'pretty' boat anchor.
Definitely in the eye of the beholder. I find Mac Pros to be fugly. That silver grill on the front is simply atrocious. The grill would look much better if the whole case were black rather than silver.
Stop smoking crack...
@macjonny
Maybe because they don't want jizz on any if the internals?
Obvious troll is obvious.
Anyone know if this is a rebadged case, or if it's custom built by maingear?
It's a Silverstone Raven with a new shell. Innards are identical and look at the logo on the 5.25" drive release.
The mac cherry has been popped for this thread.
Make that "At least 24GB of RAM," not "up to 8GB of RAM." Their site lets you add up to 24GB, which makes me think that its maximum allowable is 32GB, but I can't tell.
8GB of RAM in a machine of those specs would be an obvious bottleneck.
It's 24GB, since DDR3 is triple channel, so you always have a multiple of 3.
Bottleneck for what? There is no app that uses more than 2-3 GB of ram today so even 6GB will be overkill.
My PC has 2 and i have almost no problems and will upgrade to tipple channel 3GB kit and will solve it. Maybe 6GB is also OK. But 8+ not yet...
@Dave:
You've obviously never dabbled in any music/video recording/editing as such tasks routinely exceed memory limits for personal desktops. Why else would companies like Pixar require massive server farms to make even a 10 minute short? Just because your applications are designed to work on lower-end PCs, does not mean there are no applications that utilize larger memory reserves.
"Why else would companies like Pixar require massive server farms to make even a 10 minute short?"
Uhhh, they have server farms for processing power, not RAM. When you do 3d rendering you do 1-2 frames at a time (max of about 100-500MB per frame) then the frame is written to the harddrive.
Audio...maybe...ive never had a multi-track take up more then 3gigs (all audio live loaded) once again you are mostly dealing with Processor being fast enough to run the real-time effects on each of the loaded tracks (once again nothing to do with the total ram amount)
@Dave
Don't extrapolate your experience from using the PC at your parents' basement to be representative of the upper limits of computational requirements.
PS. The 49GB simulation job I've been running since Thursday says "hi"
Incoming Nissan lawsuit in 3...2...1...
Anyone that is curious enough to know what the maximum price is with the maximum specs, it's $15,705.98. I KNOW someone was curious besides me.
As far as my thinking is concerned I too totally agree with Platinum_Steek. I think the modified Coolermaster Cosmos Case and Thermaltake Sword are some of the best cases I have also ever seen.
Gee, somehow I expected a "personal supercomputer" to have more than one CPU.
My thoughts exactly, HUGE letdown.
you do realize that SLI and Stream can absolutely crush conventional CPU programming, right?
Hopefully the P55 option doesn't attract iPhone owners....
Someone please kill off Killer NIC!
That ginormous MAINGEAR on the front reminds me of cars with CHEVROLET in 9-inch high letters across the windshield.
Nice system, I don't know if I like the fact that all of the rear I/O connectors are on the top of the case though. I'm assuming that there must a cavity above them that gets covered with some fashion of fancy access plate. That CPU cooler looks like a de-branded Corsair H50, I have one on my i7 and it's pretty damn cool, I wish they made a similar self-enclosed liquid cooler for dual GPUs.
I was gonna buy this until I read P55. I'll stick with my HP Pavilion 6470z
They totally copied Apple on this one, and I am not even a fan of Apple let alone a Fanboy. I distinctly remember Apple having a whole series of commercials calling the G4 a supercomputer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsDMn1krXbM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzxz3k2zQJI&feature=related
Funny thing is, I have one of those sitting in my office gathering dust. I've been trying to figure out something interesting to turn that horrible acrylic case, with too many handles, into.
How is that? I don't see them copying anything from anyone on this.
personal supercomputers aren't new. Mac Pros and Lenovo ThinkStations can out benchmark older super computers....
Maybe so but they can't out benchmark this one, and that's all that really matters :P
@AI Lenovo, HP, et al sell Xeon based machines... with double the out of order cores, much much larger memories and similar GPU capabilities.
A supercomputer is not defined by what was state of the art over a decade ago. But then the GPU guys would have to find a different marketing approach ;-)
I love the case, better than the original Raven version. I hope more cases start to look like this.
But can it sync an iPhone?
But what is iPhone?
"or those in creative design fields, Maingear's expected to unveil a SHIFT just for you in the near future."
Too bad in the creative industry if your not using a Mac they think you are unprofessional...though I would love to have one of these in the office and put the mac snobs in their place :).
?!?!
@RandomGuy. They didn't copy Apple, they copied Voodoo PC. The flipped-up motherboard idea was put forth with the Voodoo Omen.
http://gizmodo.com/395418/voodoo-omen-gaming-desktop-is-most-beautiful-ever-only-6500+20000
I wasn't implying that they copied the design of the computer from Apple, just the specious marketing claim that a desktop class computer is a "SuperComputer". The Youtube links I provided were for ads where Apple was claiming the G4 was a SuperComputer.
Copying hardware designs is forgivable when you are trying to come up with a solid quality product. Copying really lame marketing gimmicks is unforgivable.
Now that's a great case I would like to have.. nice black and no ugly neon/led stuff..
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/06/bfg-technologies-phobos-gaming-pc-packs-core-i7-personal-conci/
Needs a second i7 to be as killer as they imply.
But 12 SATA ports is nice. Hmmm... The motherboard only has 9; I wonder how they feed the other 3 drives? Include a SATA port multiplier? The customization page doesn't give any clues - they don't allow ordering 12 drives, only 8. Even redirecting the eSATA ports to internal drive bays wouldn't give another three. Maybe their bays have two-port multipliers?
The power supply upgrades are really expensive. 750w is standard; increasing that by 450w to 1.2kw bumps the price by $325. But I recognize they aren't going for the price-conscious with these. Not with a starting price of $2600, before any upgrades.
Their lifetime labor is a nice touch, though you have to pay your own shipping after 30 days. Standard warranty is two years; labor is lifetime, parts isn't. Though the eVGA warranty on the motherboard is lifetime, assuming they use the AR/A1 version instead of the TR/T1 "light" version; that one only has a two-year warranty. I'd rather have a lifetime warranty if I'm buying a $400 motherboard.
Well, I've added another board to my eval list for my next system. I definitely like the nine SATA ports.
I'd rather have a Cray CX1 :P
http://www.cray.com/products/CX1.aspx
Hell, I'd be happy if someone released a case that looked like a CX1!
Does is really need to be water cooled? My current system is water cooled and I regret it, as I have already had to replace the radiator because it sprung a leak. What a mess that was, thank goodness the radiator was on the outside of the computer or it would have fried everything. Not sure I want to deal with water cooling anymore.
the inside of the Case looks like a Silverstone Raven 01
air cooling and DVD are still considered 'features'?