It’s almost impossible to accuse boutique manufacturer Maingear of going halfway on anything, as is made deeply evident with the latest version of the company’s Shift mega-gaming desktop. It may be incredibly pricey (our configuration totaled $5,289 direct), but all that dough gets you a dazzling machine loaded with all the latest components and lots of them. The skeptical or the faint of heart may think Maingear has gone overboard with everything it’s included, and on some level they may be right. But the true (and truly flush) enthusiasts know that legendary frame rates, for now and the foreseeable future, are worth paying for, and this Shift delivers them in abundance. So much so, in fact, that it qualifies as our new gaming desktop Editors’ Choice.

Design and Features
We’ve reviewed the Shift before, so we won’t belabor the point. But in brief, this is one of the most maximalist minimalist systems you can buy. Measuring 24 by 8.6 by 21.5 inches (HWD), and looking from the outside like a black aluminum monolith, it doesn’t advertise its power with crazy design schemes or hyperactive lights. On the contrary, it hides as much of itself as it can get away with: There’s a door on the front behind which you’ll find the 12x Blu-ray burner and an Epic audio interface panel (for delivering enhanced sound without adding gain), a recessed bay for the 1,200-watt power supply, and little else. You can’t even see the rear-panel ports, as they’re sequestered beneath the mesh top panel with only an opening in the back out of which the cords snake. (This looks subdued and sexy, but it makes it difficult to plug and unplug cables, and the top panel requiring a screwdriver is also an inconvenience.)

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That’s right, what’s usually found at the back of the computer is located at the top here. The Shift’s main innovation is its turning typical PC design 90 degrees clockwise by aiming all the video cards’ exhaust straight out the top; a cunning notion that takes full advantage of heat’s natural tendency to rise. And because this is a serious, packed computer, you’ll feel plenty of heat ascending: The Intel Core i7-3930K  processor has been overclocked to a blistering 4.8GHz (though, rest assured, it’s chilled with a heavy-duty Epic 180 liquid cooling apparatus), and video is provided by a muscular trio of AMD Radeon HD 7970  in a CrossFireX configuration—yes, three of the current fastest single-GPU AMD cards you can buy.

Hardware is rounded out by an Asus P9X79 Pro motherboard, which, among myriad other high-caliber features, includes integrated Bluetooth; 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 RAM; and lots of storage, in the form of two 120GB Corsair SSDs (in a RAID Level 0 array) and one 1TB Western Digital hard drive spinning at 7,200rpm. Rear-panel ports comprise five USB 2.0, four USB 3.0, two eSATA, Ethernet, eight-channel analog audio, and optical S/PDIF out; a pop-up panel near the front edge of the case’s top adds two more USB 2.0 ports (but no USB 3.0) and a multiformat card reader. If you want to add additional components later, there are three 3.5-inch internal bays and two 5.25-inch external bays free; just know that additional expansion cards are pretty much off limits as the bulky video cards block access to the motherboard’s three remaining PCI Express (PCIe) slots: one x8 and two x1.

Clean is the preinstalled Windows 7 Home Premium operating system, as well: It’s entirely free of the bloatware many major manufacturers load on. And to help you protect your investment, this Shift is covered by Maingear’s “Angelic Service” warranty, which will cover two-way shipping of your system in the event of a problem within the first 30 days, entitle you to free phone support or labor for the lifetime of the system, and guarantee you replacements of any failed parts.

Performance
If you’re thinking that a system this decked out has to be speedy, you’re right. But this is for all intents and purposes the fastest desktop we’ve ever tested—in any type of application—even compared with our previous Editors’ Choice winner, the Falcon Northwest Mach V ($6,899 direct, 4.5 stars), which was powered by Intel’s top-of-the-line Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition CPU . This system’s hefty overclock of its own six-core, 12-thread chip helped it convert a video in Handbrake in the same 54 seconds as the Mach V, but turn out superior results in the CineBench R11.5 multicore rendering test (a score of 13.98 versus the Mach V’s 12.85), the Adobe Photoshop CS5  filter application test (2 minutes 15 seconds versus 2 minutes 21 seconds), and the Futuremark PCMark 7 full-system benchmark (6,501 versus 6,154).

The Shift’s gaming prowess was no less eye-popping, its three AMD cards trouncing the three Nvidia GeForce GTX 580  cards in our tests. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get Crysis to install on the system, so our record scores there (122 frames per second, or fps, at 1,280-by-720 resolution and Medium settings on the Digital Storm ODE Level 3; and 75fps at 1,920 by 1,080 and Very High details on the Mach V) remain unchallenged for now. But the Shift attained an astounding 8,839 on the Extreme preset in Futuremark 3DMark 11 (compared with the Mach V’s 6,505) and an unreal 232fps on Lost Planet 2 at 1,920 by 1,080 and maxed-out detail settings (the Mach V managed “only” 168fps).

With capabilities like these, there’s no question that this Maingear Shift Super Stock has more than earned our admiration and our Editors’ Choice award. It displays not only how far gaming PCs can go, but how far their prices can go down (that marvelous Mach V, which we reviewed just two months ago, cost more than $1,600 more) as their potential goes up. If you have the money for the Shift, and the room to house it, you won’t be disappointed by the wonders it can do for you and any game you install on it.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:
Check out the test scores for the Maingear Shift Super Stock (Core i7-3930K)

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