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Before gaming PCs became light shows, they were projects. Beige towers tucked under desks. Side panels permanently loose. Parts swapped late at night because you were convinced it would run smoother tomorrow. The MAINGEAR Retro98 taps straight into that mindset, wrapping a full-fat 2026 gaming rig in a case that looks like it hasn’t been touched since the Howard era.
At a glance, Retro98 looks as unassuming as pre-2000s desktop towers ever were. The SilverStone FLP02 case leans hard into late-90s design language, complete with LED readouts, a turbo button and a physical lockout key on the front panel. It’s the opposite of modern PC theatre. No glass. No RGB. No visual flex. And not an ounce of irony. MAINGEAR is going all the way, like Bill Gates vaulting an office chair.
That puts Retro98 squarely in sleeper PC territory. But not the DIY kind built from scavenged office hardware, forum bravado or the latest Linus Tech Tips video. This is the polished, boutique-builder take on the idea, alongside MAINGEAR’s broader run of nostalgic sleeper builds. Behind the beige exterior sits modern silicon doing ridiculous things: Ryzen X3D processors, RTX 50-series GPUs, fast DDR5 memory and cooling systems that would’ve sounded absurd in 1998.
Everything powerful is deliberately hidden. Even the details lean into the joke, from the old-school “ketchup and mustard” cable colourways to the coiled tubing that nods to early water-cooling experiments. On the extreme end, the Retro98α goes fully unhinged, with a custom Alphacool open loop and a pump and reservoir proudly housed in the old 5.25-inch drive bay space. It’s excessive, but for all the right reasons.
Retro98 isn’t here to be sensible. You’re paying for performance most people will never see, inside a case that actively refuses to show it off. The trade-off is airflow. There’s a reason modern cases are covered in mesh.
You’re not buying Retro98 to chase benchmark charts. As MAINGEAR founder and CEO Wallace Santos puts it, “This drop is for those of us who tore open the family PC just to install a 3DFX accelerator. Retro98 brings back that feeling of chasing every last frame, waiting for the dial tone to download driver updates, and building a system that could handle the most graphics-intensive 32-bit games. Except this time, we built the one your younger self always dreamed of.”
That’s who this is for. The people who liked knowing what was inside the box, even if nobody else did. Retro98 isn’t about going back to 1998. It’s about remembering when PCs felt personal.
MAINGEAR Retro98 – Configurations & Pricing (USD)
- Retro98 | RTX 5070 – from $2,499
- Retro98 | RTX 5080 – from $3,499
- Retro98 | RTX 5090 – from $4,999
- Retro98α (Open-Loop Liquid Cooled) – $9,799
Australian pricing not confirmed.
Limited to 32 standard units plus 6 alpha builds, available exclusively via MAINGEAR. Each system is hand-built by a single technician and backed by lifetime support.
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