Maingear ZERO Gaming PC Review: The Cleanest Desktop PC Ever

Thermals and power consumption go hand-in-hand with a system's performance. At a base level, it would be easy to say "more power equals more performance," but that's not always the case. Despite this section being toward the end of the review, we're careful to examine the thermals and power consumption of a system before we do our benchmarks because it sets expectations of the machine's capabilities.

To test idle power, we rebooted the machine and then left it idle until the power consumption leveled off at its lowest point. The idle power figure in the chart below is not necessarily the absolute lowest value that we recorded, but it represents an approximate average of low values over a 1 minute period.

For load power, we've chosen to select a realistic and practical workload that most people who buy this machine are likely to encounter: gaming. While the Prime95-and-Furmark torture test is a critical part of our overall testing and validation process, and we'll talk more about it below, it really isn't representative of the kind of power a machine like this will consume in day to day use.

Your eyes do not deceive you; the Maingear ZERO is surprisingly power-efficient while gaming. We recorded these results in multiple games, including F1 2022, Cyberpunk 2077, and Baldur's Gate III. To some degree this comes down to the high power efficiency of NVIDIA's Ada Lovelace GPUs, but credit where it's due: Intel's also done the work powering down CPU cores when they're not in use. Overall this machine offers you several times the performance of a PlayStation 5 for only around double the power, and that ain't bad.

It should be no particular surprise, then, that this machine is actually able to stay quite cool. After all, low power consumption means low heat output. However, the HWiNFO temperature results above aren't while gaming. Instead, we captured these numbers after a ninety-minute-plus torture test with Prime95 and Furmark. In that light, the fact that neither CPU or GPU ever hit their thermal limits is quite impressive. 

The Core i9-14900K is difficult to keep cool, but even after more than an hour of pounding the chip with an intense AVX2 workload drawing some 253 watts, it kept away from its temperature limit. Of course, the Geforce RTX 4080 SUPER and its massive three-slot cooler had no problem staying frosty. Now what kind of racket was the machine making after all that?

Well, according to our tests, not too much. This noise measurement was taken about one meter away from the machine while it was churning away on the aforementioned Prime95-and-Furmark torture test. All of the fans had ramped up, and the system is certainly audible at this noise level, but it's very far from bothersome. The 120-mm fans create a soft humming noise that, in our opinion, is actually quite pleasant. The machine is much quieter than this while gaming and is essentially inaudible, in fact. You won't hear anything close to this sound level unless you run a long Blender render or something similar.

Normally, when writing the conclusion to a review, pricing is the last thing we address. We're going to get to it right away here, because it's really the only matter of contention. Maingear's list price for this system is $3,389 USD. That nets you an incredibly powerful gaming PC with top-class aesthetics and a legitimately unique feature. You won't find this motherboard in other boutique vendors' catalogs, at least not yet.

We won't re-tread the whole argument about whether it's generally worth it to buy your PC pre-built system or build it yourself. If you're reading this, you've almost assuredly read that discussion before, and perhaps even participated in it yourself. Buying your machine from Maingear gets you the assurance that it will work out of the box and that you'll be covered for at least a year if anything goes wrong. If something happens in the first month, you don't even have to pay for shipping for the repairs.

With that said, we have to point out that there is a considerable premium attached to this machine. We parted out an equivalent build with the same components, including the same case, for around $2900. That includes the extra fans and a retail copy of Windows 11 Pro. All told, you're looking at around a $600 (or about 20%) markup over the price of the parts alone. 

With the difference in price, you could add two more 4TB SSDs to the system. Alternatively, it's a solid start on upgrading to a GeForce RTX 4090. Of course, should something go wrong with your custom-built computer, you're going to have to track down invoices and deal with doing the repairs yourself and all of the hassle associated with shipping and RMAs. Ultimately, your bespoke build probably wouldn't look as cool as the ZERO, either. 

Is it worth it? That's for you to decide. For our money, we'd like to see some lower-latency memory and a more user-friendly GPU bracket, but those are pretty minor complaints in the grand scheme. All told, we're pretty keen on the Maingear option, which is why the new ZERO Legendary Boost earns our Editor's Choice award. This is an impeccably-built gaming PC with excellent performance and great looks.