Booting up Maingear’s Shift Super Stock Z87 was a bit of a letdown. Given its $8000 price tag, I expected this high-performance hot rod to greet me with the throaty rumble of a precision-tuned sports car. But it didn’t make a sound because each of its ultra-premium components is water-cooled and whisper quiet.
At the top of the component list is Intel’s Core i7-4770K CPU—the pinnacle of the chip company’s brand-new Haswell family—and it’s overclocked to an insane 4.7GHz. You’ll also find three (yes, three) video cards based on Nvidia’s best GPU, the GeForce GTX Titan, each with 6GB of GDDR5 memory. There’s alsolending device16GB of DDR3/2400 system memory, and not one, not two, but four of the best 256GB SSD we’ve tested—Samsung’s 840 Pro—configured as RAID 0 for blistering speed.
ROBERT CARDINThe Maingear Shift Super Stock Z87 is a mean, green gaming machine. It’s a stupefying level of computing power, one that sets the bar for what an elite gaming PC should be. And this machine’s very existence demonstrates the enduring strength and appeal of the PC gaming market. Indeed, high-end gaming PCs like the Shift Z87 continue to sell well despite a precipitous drop in overall PC sales, and it’s not crazy to suggest that as more people abandon budget PCs and laptops in favor of tablets, premium hardware like the Shift will keep the PC gaming market afloat.
The Maingear Shift Super Stock Z87 turned in an exceptional Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score. The Shift Z87’s Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 435 means it’s more than four times faster than our reference system, the modest Acer Aspire A5600U-UB13 . In fact, it’s the fastest desktop PC we’ve ever encountered. While that overall score is only modestly higher than the 421 that MicroFlex’s significantly cheaper MicroExpress 47B earned, the Shift Z87 blew the competition out of the water when we benchmarked it playing the latest games at very high resolution.
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