Maingear's Innovative Stealth Gaming PC Designed With Gigabyte Is Now Available
It's taken a few months but Project Stealth, the joint collaboration between Maingear and Gigabyte to turn cable management on its head, is now available to configure and purchase. Pricing on the innovative prebuilt gaming desktop starts at $1,999, though before we get to the stock and customizable part selections, let's recap what makes this PC so unique.
Project Stealth is, in part, the fruition of a clever redesign of the standard ATX motherboard, in which the connectors are moved to the backside of the PCB. Maingear patented this design way back in 2011 and shopped it around to several companies at the time but was unable to find a willing design partner.
Then earlier this year, Gigabyte's official Aorus Twitter account in France posted some "Project Stealth" concept renders. There was a bit of controversy as Gigabyte didn't credit Maingear at the time, and we spoke about this with Maingear CEO Wallace Santos in a 2.5 Geeks webcast last December.
Long story short, Santos was more interested in seeing this innovative design become a reality and moving the industry forward, than filing lawsuits. And so, it worked with Gigabyte to bring Project Stealth to market.
"Utilizing Maingear’s revolutionary patent, Gigabyte's Project Stealth moves all of the cable connectors to the back of the motherboard for simplified setup. This includes ports for ATX power, CPU power, fans, USB, audio, front panel, and more," Maingear stated in a press release earlier this year.
This unique design effectively hides every single cable from view, with only the tubing from the all-in-one CPU cooler visible in the forefront. The result is an ultra-clean design without any wires or cables to get in the way of airflow.
Configuring A Maingear Stealth Gaming PC
For anyone who is interested, pricing for Maingear's Stealth gaming PC starts at $1,999 for a modest configuration. The baseline setup consists of a 6-core/12-thread Intel 12th Gen Core i5-12400F processor clocked 2.5GHz to 4.4GHz, Cooler Master Hyper 212 RGB air cooler, Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Elite Stealth motherboard, 16GB of Fury Beast RGB DDR5-5200 RAM, GeForce RTX 3070 Stealth, 512GB Intel 670p SSD, EVGA 750W SuperNova power supply, and Windows 11 Home. This all comes stuffed into a custom chassis designed for special cable management at play.
That's roughly $1,500 worth of hardware and software (Windows 11), depending on what price premium you put on the custom chassis and specialized version of the motherboard and GPU. Considering the boutique build quality and support you can expect from Maingear, we'd say the asking price is pretty fair. We haven't spent any hands-on time with a Stealth build, though,
Upgrade options abound, from higher end CPU (up to a Core i9-12900KS) with liquid cooling to beefier RAM and storage combinations. That said, you're limited to a GeForce RTX 3070 for graphics. It's unclear if there will be upgrade options with power connectors placed on the backside like Gigabyte's custom Stealth version that ships with this PC.
If you're interested in the Stealth desktop, you can head to Maingear's website and configure it the way you want. The product page indicates that orders will ship in 5-10 business days.
