While we were out in Vegas for CES 2010 we saw a ton of people [and some cool new toys] one of the most interesting visits was with Maingear. When I walked into their suite I expected to be shown some new and fast system that they are cooking up. However, while they did have a very fast system to show us it was not one that is new. What we saw was a Maingear Shift. Now do not get me wrong, the Shift is a very fast system, and as Chris says they “removed the dork” from the SilverStone Raven RV-01 to get the clean and sexy look of the Shift.
No what caught me by surprise was who they see as their customer. Maingear has the goal of snatching the high-end computing customer right from Apple. Yup, you heard right. Maingear’s target market is anyone fed up with Apple. Now I know that some of you are going to ask how they plan to do this. Well, it is pretty simple really. First they plan to make a system that simply trounces even the best Apple workstation in terms of hardware performance [including dual and tri-GPU systems] then they plan to give you a true 64-bit operating system that is not bound by the limitation and restrictions that Apple puts on all their products.
Before this talk, I had thought that Maingear was only aiming at the high-end gamer and did not have the desire to extend beyond that realm. It looks like I was seriously wrong; they not only have the desire, but the tools and the will to build amazing workstation class systems for professional audio/video, photography, and HPC systems. After all now that we know Adobe is putting full [and scalable] Cuda support into CS5 can you imagine what a Maingear system with 3 GTX 285s stuffed into it can do for your video production work? I know I am eagerly waiting to see them push then workstation envelope. If for no other reason than to see just what Maingear can offer this upper level of consumer.
Who knows, maybe we will see something coming with Seagate’s new Pulsar SSDs, or EVGA’s new Dual 1366 board, and…. Maybe even a tri-Fermi system in the future from Maingear. If these do happen, well I think that Maingear can seriously eat into Apple’s coveted market.
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