Maingear Shows Off SHIFT Personal Supercomputer

Maingear has announced their latest series of high horsepower muscle PCs. Well, you could probably build this yourself for half the price, but there are plenty of folks out there who just want to snag the fastest off the shelf PC they can get and go play games, or do video editing or 3D graphics. This new high power PC is aimed at them.

The Maingear SHIFT is being touted as a "personal supercomputer", whatever that is, but its really just a liquid cooled Core i7 or Xeon box. Yes, we know, they installed the motherboard sideways and made the airflow from the bottom and tweaked the aluminum case to allow three GPUs to be installed. Yes, graphics cards do put out a lot of heat. But you won't see this brick on desks in the Jet Propulsion Labs or Oak Ridge National Laboratories; its no supercomputer.

Actually, you might not see it on any desk, since the case measures 21.6 inches by 8.6 inches by 24 inches. Whats inside it? Specs on the SHIFT include Core i7 processor in either P55 or X58 motherboard, closed loop liquid CPU cooling for up to 4 GHz speeds, 6 hard drive bays, holding up to 12 SSDs, Silverstone power supply up to 1.2KW, Kingston HyperX DDR3-2000 at 2000MHz (up to 8 GB total on the i7 version, and up to 24 GB RAM total on the X58 version), and your choice of Nvidia GeForce or ATI graphics cards. Each PC is rated for 50,000 hours of operation. The P55 motherboard version starts at $2,199 and the X58 version starts at $2,599, not including graphics card.