How much luxury are you willing to pay for? This is an important question to ask yourself when considering any ultra-high-end gaming desktop, but it's particularly relevant with one as polished and as powerful as the top-tier configuration of the Maingear Rush X99 Super Stock. Priced at a dizzying $9,569 (although the Rush line starts at "only" $1,779), it may drain your bank account to its bottommost pennies, but it looks so stunning and performs so well that it's hard to argue against it if buying it wouldn't land you in the poor house.
Design and Features
The Rush X99 Super Stock chassis is a sturdy all-aluminum enclosure (measuring approximately 21.4 by 8.8 by 22.6 inches, HWD) that suggests strength, mystery, and even a little sex appeal in between. Beneath the smooth finish (painted a pleasing "Shock Blue" on our review unit, but, like everything else here, configurable to your tastes), which from the top extends down both the front and the back, are compartments designed to tightly yet suavely contain each major element of the build. These include: two intake fans (front bottom), 1,200-watt Corsair power supply (rear bottom), three exhaust fans (rear top), liquid cooling reservoir (front top), liquid cooling radiator (front, emblazoned with a towering Maingear logo), and components (everything else). Tinted tempered glass side panels, each of which attaches with four (color-coordinated!) screws, both guard and display everything.
Maingear has made full use of the Rush's space, too. The Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition processor, pre-overclocked from its base 3GHz to a blazing 4.2GHz here (of course), is a given on the feature-packed MSI XPower Gaming Titanium motherboard. So is the large amount (32GB) of super-fast Kingston HyperX Predator memory—though you still have four memory slots left in case you want to add more. Then there are two Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 video cards, because one couldn't possibly be enough. Nor is storage a problem: The Windows 10 boot drive is a 1.2TB Intel 750 Series NVMe solid-state drive (SSD), which is about as fast as they come, but the data drive, a 1TB Samsung 850 Evo SSD, is no slouch, either; and an external Blu-ray writer is included, too, for easily backing up or watching HD movies. And, though you probably expected the Maingear Epic 640 liquid cooling system to be operating on the processor and probably the video cards, as it is, it's worth mentioning that the heat-prone Intel SSD is hooked up to it, too—Maingear is taking no chances—and there's even a second, smaller reservoir at the rear so you can add additional coolant without having to dismantle the case to get at the big one. Plenty of white LED lights ensure full visibility of your showpiece. Even the wireless connectivity is top-of-the-line: 802.11ac.
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Only a couple of minor inconveniences mar the experience. External cable management may present a challenge. The position of the front-panel ports (three USB 3.0, one USB-C, headphone and mic jacks, plus buttons for power and lighting) near the bottom, above the fan opening in the front, somewhat complicates plugging in devices like hard drives and headphones. If you place the Rush with the smooth, narrow front panel facing out, the ports will be even tougher to access; if you turn the Rush to the side so you can see the stylish internals, you're going to have to make a lot of extra room on or beneath your desk. Though the metal rear panel, which is held on by four easy-turn thumbscrews, has plenty of holes to allow cables and cords to snake out, you'll have to remove it every time you want to plug in or unplug anything. There are a lot of ports there you'll want to use, too: two USB 2.0 and one PS/2 for connecting a keyboard and mouse, a separate USB port dedicated for BIOS flashback use, four USB Type-A ports, two USB 3.1 ports (one Type-C, one Type-A), plus eight-channel audio ports and S/PDIF.
Similarly, the intricate layout and complex construction of everything inside means you aren't going to be able to easily make upgrades yourself, something that won't appeal to natural tinkerers. Admittedly, if you're spending almost $10,000 on a computer, you're probably not the type who'd want to do that kind of tweaking, but it's still an option that's not really realistic here.
The Rush is protected by Maingear's Angelic Service Warranty, which covers a lifetime of labor and phone support and a full one-year warranty.
Performance
Not that there was likely to be much question about it, but this configuration of the Rush delivered ridiculously good performance, particularly in gaming. It mocked our 3DMark graphics tests, with scores of 60,308 on the lower-end Cloud Gate test and 18,484 on the more demanding Fire Strike Extreme. As this is the first super-expensive dual–GTX 1080 system we've tested, we don't even really have anything appropriate to compare it against. As a general frame of reference, the Digital Storm Aura , a recent gaming-focused all-in-one with a single 1080 card, earned 35,979 and 9,585 on the same tests; and a Maingear desktop from this past spring, the F131 X99 Super Stock , with a comparable (albeit last-generation) layout, attained 53,731 and 14,001, respectively.
The Rush likewise sailed through our Heaven and Valley benchmark tests as well, with frame rates of 258 frames per second (fps) and 133fps in each the lower quality settings, and 208fps (the best result we've seen) and 132fps when we turned them (and the resolution) all the way up. These were not all the absolute highest scores we've seen for either of these tests; our contacts at Maingear told us this was likely due to some incompatibilities between the testing software and the dual Pascal-based GTX 1080 cards.
The Rush, though, is designed to push the boundaries of the current and the next generations of gaming, which means 4K and VR, which everything in it was essentially designed to handle. Though we're still incorporating it into our testing routine, and thus don't have many usable results for it yet, the 4K-scaled 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra test returned a 10,574 score on the Rush—well above what we've seen from the first two gaming laptops with Pascal graphics (GTX 1070), the Asus ROG G752VS-XB78K Overclocked Edition , and the MSI GT62VR Dominator Pro-005 ( at Amazon) , on which we've run it (3,986 and 3,904 were those scores).
Although productivity performance is somewhat secondary in a gaming desktop like this one, the Rush hardly disappoints. Its times of 28 seconds in our HandBrake video encoding test and 2 minutes, 26 seconds, were spectacular, as was its class-leading result of 2,208 in CineBench R15. It's worth pointing out, though, that because the Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition processor is based on an older (Broadwell) microarchitecture and has a relatively low base clock, some single- or lightly threaded applications may run slightly faster on other chips. The much more affordable CybertronPC Titanium we tested earlier this year, for example, posted a Photoshop time of only 2:17, and the earlier Super Stock was just a shade behind at 2:19. Given that these kinds of activities are not the intended thrust of the Rush, its times on them are still superb, and it will obliterate all comers on highly threaded workloads, this is not something to worry about—but it's worth being aware of.
Conclusion
If you believe that a computer, like a car, can be a status symbol, the fully loaded Maingear Rush X99 Super Stock stands as the current confluence of the arts. Yes, it has all the newest, hottest, and beefiest hardware, but beyond that, it looks like it was built with the love and obsessive attention to detail that always set this kind of product apart. This is not the kind of computer or configuration you should buy if you can settle for anything less: There's no getting around its sky-high cost, and unless you already have an Oculus Rift ($540.00 at Amazon) , an HTC Vive ($989.99 at Amazon) , and a 4K gaming monitor (such as our Editors' Choice, the LG 27UD88-W ($699.99 at Amazon) ) you use regularly to the extent of their capabilities, you'll just be paying thousands extra for parts and performance you don't technically need.
Yes, under most ordinary circumstances, something like the Digital Storm Aura, the pint-size but still attractive MSI Vortex G65 ( at Amazon) , or newer refits of previous-round top rigs like the CybertronPC Titanium, Maingear's F131 Super Stock or X-Cube Z170 , the Digital Storm Bolt 3 , or others will suit you just fine (and save you thousands of dollars). But just as you may want to splurge on a BMW or Ferrari instead of a Ford or a Chrysler because you care as much about how you get there as you do where you're going, the Maingear Rush X99 Super Stock will get you to your destination in nearly unmatched style. Expensive or not, that makes it worthy of an Editors' Choice award in our book.
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