"Late-'90s desktops hummed under desks in beige towers that always felt heavier than they should. CRTs flickered, CD drives whirred, and somewhere in every PC gamer's mind lived a fantasy build they only saw in shop windows or magazine ads. The gap between the family PC that struggled with Quake and the dream rig you sketched in notebooks, complete with turbo buttons and drive bays, felt impossibly wide."
"Maingear's Retro98 is that fantasy finally built. The limited-run sleeper PC uses a retro beige SilverStone tower with a working turbo button and keyed power lockout, but hides 2026 hardware inside. The pitch is simple: 1998 on the outside, 2026 inside. It is the machine your younger self would have lost their mind over if they could see past the beige and understood what an RTX 5070 even meant."
Maingear's Retro98 recreates late-1990s beige PC aesthetics using a retro SilverStone tower with a working turbo button and keyed power lockout while housing modern components. The limited run includes 38 hand-built units: 32 standard and six water-cooled Retro98α rigs with braided ketchup-and-mustard cables. Even the base Retro98 5070 pairs an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 with an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K, 32 GB DDR5-6000, and a 2 TB NVMe SSD. Each system is assembled by a single technician, positioned as a boutique release. Front-panel rituals, like toggling the turbo button to change performance profiles, revive tactile computing traditions.
Read at Yanko Design - Modern Industrial Design News
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