Back in 1998, I was just a Wii lad playing games like Diablo I and
Starcraft. Well, Main Gear decided to take me back to that magical time before
everything kind of went upside down with their new Retro 98. Let's take a look at
this thing. This is just the Silverstone box because they're just using the FLPO2
from Silverstone, which is a really cool retro style case. Uh, but they're adding
their own Main Gear twist to it that we're going to take a look at. Yeah.
>> Okay. Pretty cool. Uh, one minor thing that I'm actually noticing right away,
they're kind of just using the foam that comes in the Silverstoneone box for the
case. And when it's just the case, that's fine. This foam can't withstand a
ton of shocks or, you know, drops or vibrations. But, uh, you can see that
here because we've got all that extra
weight from our computer components. Um,
it looks like this was dropped at some point and the whole bottom just kind of
shredded. Not ideal, but that's okay
because the rest of the system did show up intact. I'm just a little surprised
because like I've opened computers for Mang Gear on Secret Shopper and the Doom
PC and they're just usually packaged a little nicer than this. Take me back to
the beige era. Back when everyone used to smoke inside so all of your beige
plastic components turned yellow over time. I love when you'd go into
someone's house whose like parents were smokers and you'd look at their Super
Nintendo and it's like yellow. They don't even smoke in the living room with
the TV, but like it doesn't matter. Uh, got a little extra hardware bag from
Main Gear. Probably power supply cables.
Ah, we've got our key because we'll get
to it later. But this has a lock on the front. Okay, what else we got? C13 power
cable. Our Wi-Fi antenna. Power supply. Power supply. power supply. These look
like cable combs, although for which cables, I'm not quite sure. Oh, just
some uh motherboard accessories. We've got our CPU socket cover. Keep this in
case you ever have to RMA anything. Uh SATA cables. This looks like a fan
extension or RGB. Cool. So, this bag was just all motherboard stuff. And then
we've got some screws and some zip ties. We've also got this AMD mounting [music]
hardware probably for the cooler that goes in the system. One thing to note,
there are four different configurations of the Retro 98. This is the lowest tier
option. It's got an RTX 5070, but it's
also got our only Intel CPU, a Core Ultra 7265K.
Every other tier of the Retro 98 is
going to have an AMD 9800 X3D, 9850 X3D,
or I think the top tier is a 9950 X3D. Either way, they're all X3D chips except
for this guy. Uh, one thing that I love right away,
it's a solid side [music] panel and so it is like a true sleeper. The one thing
about that is that RGB, you know, this probably isn't going to glow very much.
I think up at the top we've got some fans and maybe at the back, but uh otherwise any RGB that's installed is
kind of useless. But the other cool thing is all on the front. So, we've got
these drive bays. They are openable.
Okay. Well, I'll do that once. Uh, yeah, let's just pop. Sure. Whatever. You can
actually put a 5 and a/4 in drive in here. So, let's say you want a Blu-ray
player or I don't even know cuz I haven't had to use a 5 and a/4
[laughter] in bay in like over 15 years.
But yeah, if you've got some cool thing that's really old like like maybe one of
those little sine wave uh guys that people used to put on the front of their computers, uh you can do that. One thing
to note actually is that they've got the AIO installed so that the hose is over
here. You might have to flip that if you want to fit something that actually
pushes all the way back. And then if you buy one of the higherend systems, I
think it's the Alpha, that one is going to have a reservoir
>> [music] >> um in this spot cuz it's custom water cooled. So depending on your actual use
case, if this is just, you know, cosmetic for you, doesn't matter. But if
it's not and you're going to actually use it for something, just something to think about. Another really cool 5 and
a/4 in bay uh solution that you could use is like extra IO ports on the front.
However, Silverstone did something really cool here. Look at that. There's
your top front case IO. It's all hidden back here. And we've got a couple of
USBA ports, USBC, and then it looks like
a headphone jack. At the very least, it's probably a mic headphone combo
jack. And then, if you haven't noticed already, I don't know how you can miss
it. Um, we've got a really cool like power switch system. This is where it
is. You're not There's no button up here. There's no button on the side. That's not a button. That's your power
button. You can actually lock the power button with the keys. Clearly doesn't
physically lock the switch. So, I'm guessing it just like hits a relay that
turns it off or something. I don't We'll try it once it's actually plugged in. Um, but you should be able to lock your
computer, which is pretty sweet. And then you've got like a proper reset button and a turbo button. For those of
you unaware, turbo buttons used to adjust your clock speed on your CPU,
either to slow it down or I think sometimes it sped it up, but it was
mostly to slow it down to keep the clocks in line with whatever game you were playing. Our turbo button does not
affect your CPU like that. Instead, what it's going to do is just ramp up all of
our fans. Uh, the Labs did test this thing and ramping up the fans does make
a temperature difference, but it's not a drastic one. So, I don't know. For me,
it's mostly just a cool aesthetic thing. I probably wouldn't turn it on cuz like
I don't know, your CPU is going to be pretty cool anyway, but uh just a neat
little feature to give a little throwback to the times of Yore. I also
love how they've got this old school like Main Gear 98 logo on the bottom
here. Looks like a classic early 3D logo
kind of thing. One cool thing I just kind of noticed is you can see on the
little board they've got back here for all these controls. It even says turbo
right there. One of the cool things is that unlike, you know, building your own
sleeper PC that is kind of a nightmare sometimes trying to fit modern hardware
in an old case. This is a new case that just is styled in a retro way. And so it
has modern features like these nice thumb screws and you know the whole case
pulls apart no problem. I'm going to take a look at the back first. And of
course, in classic Main Gear fashion, it is beautifully cable managed. On top of
easily removable panels, we've got rubber grommets. We've also got some
nice cable tie down points and some decent cable routing. And then we've
also got a couple of nice 2 and 1/2 in SSD sleds back here. Love to see it. My
only other kind of complaint is that for this system with a 5070 and a Core Ultra
7265K, we've only got a 650 watt 80 plus
gold power supply. It is a nice MSI power supply and it is 80 plus gold
which is great. I just I would have loved 750 this way. You know, we're kind
of like really up against the limits
right now. And so if you make any kind of upgrades in the future, you can probably get away with it if it's not
too big of a deal. But like you're not going to be throwing a 5080 or 5090 in
here without uh maybe secondg guessing upgrading the power supply. For
instance, their 5080 version, which is just the next tier up from this, comes
with an 850 W power supply. So if that's what they're putting alongside that,
it's probably what you're going to want, too. So minor issue, but you're still
getting what you pay for. The price is actually relatively reasonable uh based
on the hardware inside this. We'll get to that later. First, I want to show you the inside on this side, the good stuff.
Here's our RTX 5070. It is a Founders Edition, you know, which do look pretty
sexy. And they've even done uh their due diligence and actually managed the cable
to go along it and then out instead of just dropping down into here or
something. That would have just been kind of lazy. So, it actually looks pretty sleek. And then the really nice
thing is, you know, memory is hard to come by these days. And these are two 16
gig sticks of DDR5. So we're getting 32 gigs of DDR5. Pretty solid. And then
we've just got a 360 mm AIO from Main
Gear right here. So whatever CPU you upgrade to, AMD or not, change the
board, doesn't matter. This cooler should be uh plenty strong enough for
it. And then as for storage, we've got a 2 terbte Gen 4 NVMe drive. Those are
also becoming very hard to come by. So,
you know, I never thought I'd say this, but [music] maybe it is time to buy a
pre-built instead of building your own PC. I'm actually in the middle of
building my own NAS right now. And let me tell you, I just spent $1,200 on hard
drives. And I'm glad I did because they're basically impossible to find now, just a couple weeks later. And even
SSDs, I'm lucky that I already have a boot drive because even Gen 4 like one
or two TB drives are either way up in price or just unavailable. All of our
cables are pretty nicely managed. just, you know, it looks really pretty. I'm a
big fan of um having this like fully
modern look, but if you get the alpha version, which is the most top tier of
top tier, you get some cool like ketchup and mustard cables for that really
classic red and yellow look for those of you who want it. One other cool thing I
just noticed if they is they've got this really cool like fan hub over here in
the back. So, you've actually got if you do want to add more fans, the ones they
include are actually pretty solid. We tested them and they performed better than we expected, but there's a big fan
hub here. Yeah, very nice. You can also pop the top off pretty easily by just
undoing this screw and pulling that out there if you ever need to change
anything with your radiator. That's how you get at it. And once we get to the
back, there are a couple of pretty cool things. Uh, one, if you did want to,
there are vertical mount slots for your GPU. You're not going to see it unless
you take the side panel off, but you know, if you take that side panel off to show things off, you're probably out of
LAN or something. And so it'll look pretty sick and like you totally could.
It' be pretty awesome. But there was one small problem. It's not a big deal, but
this fan is set to intake currently, and there's no uh mesh filter at all for
dust. So, your PC will maybe get a little dusty over time, but like it's
probably not that I don't know, it's probably not that bad. Uh the other issue though is that this motherboard
when we received it, it didn't have a little sticker over it saying, "Hey,
don't plug your monitor into this. Plug it into the graphics card." So, if
you're new to PC gaming, just don't use these. That's for your motherboard's
onboard graphics, which thankfully the Core Ultra 7265K has, but um your
performance is going to be kind of trash [laughter]
if that's where you plug your monitor into. Uh but I do love how the board
also has some pretty decent IO. I mean, we've got plenty of USB, uh USBC with
power delivery, and it's even got a PS2 port if you really want to complete the
look and use a really old school mouse and keyboard. One thing I neglected to
mention is it's got a 3D printed GPU bracket, which is great. But the only
problem is it's attached over here, so you've kind of got to take your
motherboard off to get the bracket off, which kind of sucks. The other thing is
it did come packaged without any internal uh foam, like you know, the
self-expanding stuff. They do have that GPU anti-ag bracket, so it's probably
fine, but I would like to see just a
little bit more um packing material. it. They usually do it. So, I was kind of
surprised that it didn't come with any. Overall, it looks pretty sick and I
would love to have something like this. Uh, so let's get it all put back
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>> Moment of truth. [music] Maybe it's locked. It is.
All right. Yo, the lock button works. That's so
cool. And it looks like our LED screen here. I'm not sure if that 49 is our CPU
temp, but it probably is. I'm not sure what else it might [music] represent.
Wa! [screaming] This is awesome. And we've got the same like 3D Main Gear logo set to our
wallpaper here with a little 98. This thing is dope. We've got one of those
dual mode monitors here. And I was about to set this to like 4K cuz I don't need
500 Hz, but uh I forgot that we've only got a 5070. So this might be one of the
actual times where I do want to run at 1080p
and just cool 500 Hz, why not? So yeah, let's do that. Let's swap that back. Now
that our display is ready to go and we've got our computer all fired up, we're going to change to 60 FPS on our
camera cuz we're about to game. Just going to check out some of our specs
real quick here. Uh, yep, there's our CPU. As for our memory, 32 gigs,
currently running at 4,800 megat transfers per second. I am pretty sure
that there is a profile setup, but it's not enabled out of the box. So, if you
do buy this, because it says it was handbuilt by one guy, it's entirely
possible that the same mistake is across every system. So, we're going to go
ahead and enable all of our XMPP so that we get the rated speed because these
sticks should go to like 6,000 megat transfers per second. And uh you know,
if I paid for it, I didn't, but if you paid for it, then you should get it. One
last thing before we do that though, I've opened up hardware info and I want to just see if like our CPU temperature
matches what's displayed there. Um or
our GPU temps, maybe cuz yeah, I'm sitting at like 33 C, 39 C, and that's
only 26 27. Okay, CPU GT cores are set
to 28. So maybe it's measuring that. I don't know. Where's our GPU? Even our
graphics card is measuring about 33 34C. So I'm not 100% sure if that's correct.
But you know what? Let's hit the turbo button. Instantly the fans crank up. Now it says
HH, which I'm a little concerned about.
I don't think it should say HH. I'll let you figure out why. All right.
memory 6,400 mega transfers per second, which I think is actually faster than
the 6,000 that it's rated for. Um, so I don't know if they just gave us a memory
bump or what, but yeah, it's running faster than it should. So that's always great. Still haven't confirmed that the
CPU temp is correct on the readout there. One thing that I forgot to
mention earlier is that as you can tell,
or maybe not, it's a little noisy right now after I enabled XMPP and restarted
it. Um, if I hit the turbo button,
it's already loud and you hear new fans ramp up. And that's because it's only
connected to the case fans. It's not actually affecting our AIO, which is
kind of annoying. I really wish all of them were just connected to the one
turbo button. Just going to load up some Cyberpunk really quick. We did test a
number of games and guess what? They all perform like they would on a 5070 and a
Core Ultra 265K with uh the memory and storage that we have in there. So, you
know, you're not giving up any performance. You're getting what you paid for. Hell yeah. All right. RTX
5070. You know, 1080p, but we're set to ray tracing medium, and we're getting
like 120 115 FPS. Pretty solid here. Uh,
Cyberpunk looks great. I'm going to blast these people. Yeah, we tested
Cyberpunk, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Last of Us, Alan Wake 2, and F1. And all
of those games performed as expected. As
for temps, they also performed as expected. Our turbo mode does make a
very minor difference, but it makes a difference. Makes sense. Fans going
faster, pushing [music] more air, cooling down components. Not a huge deal
cuz uh you know, this thing's not going to get that hot already, but I could
seeing it being a great feature for one of the higherend systems with the higherend hardware in them. One final
unfortunate thing about this is that it is getting pretty loud. like this is,
you know, at this point I'd like to have the computer under the desk and maybe even a separate room. Uh because ever
since we enabled XMPP, I don't know if it just enabled a different fan profile
or what, but I don't know. I can hear them even with the side panel on. And if
you hit the turbo button,
it just gets louder. To be clear, I did enable XMPP and change some settings, so
that might be the problem. But like, I don't know. I paid for 6,000 mega
transfers per second memory. I want to use 6,000 mega transfers per second
memory. Now, as for the price, all of
our hardware considered, $2,500 for this guy isn't really a bad deal, especially
when you look at the prices of SSDs and RAM right now. However, if you go up to
the alpha version with a 5090, it's going to cost you $9,800, which I think
is a little extreme. Um, I don't know
how much I can justify that price. I'm honestly not even sure if they were
like, you know, it's nine grand, but it's the N it's the Retro98. We should
just charge 9,800. I from a marketing perspective, sure, I agree. From a user
perspective, I'm not so sure if I'm personally willing to shell out for the
top tier system. This one though, I think it's reasonable considering what
you're getting. But if you don't want to do that, you know, Mangar does offer
pretty good support when it comes to pre-builts. Check out Secret Shopper.
You can get the FLP2 from Silverstone
for about $250. It's still an expensive
case, um, but it's honestly pretty solid and you're getting something that's very
unique. And so, at that point, I would honestly I like this case. I I kind of
want to buy one myself just to build my next computer in it, whatever that may
be. And you know what? I'm not really sure when the end of this video is going to be. Maybe it's now. Uh, thanks for
watching. I'm This is ShortCircuit. If you want to check out another one, uh,
check out the Doom PC. That was also for main gear and it was also very