Maingear Retro95 Review: Welcome, You've Got Mail (From New Jersey)

Forbes

5 days ago

Retro95
New Jersey, like most of our beloved United States, is famous for a bunch of seemingly disparate bits of culture: Snookie and the infamous Shore, Judy Blume and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Goosebumps artist Tim Jacobus, Bruce Springsteen and Thunder Road, hot dogs and salt water taffy on the boardwalk, and well, respectable gaming PCs, actually.
Speaking of, the team over at Maingear (based in NJ, naturally) recently sent me some exciting computer mail, and opening the well-secured shipping box immediately made me feel like a wide-eyed 10-year-old all over again—as if I were logging onto AOL, ready to frantically search keyword NICK so I could read more about Rocko's Modern Life and The Secret World of Alex Mack.
Cue the Vaporwave, fam. We're about to get wistful.
Design
After tearing away all the boring packaging, I was greeted by the system integrator's stunning Retro95, an objectively powerful throwback PC built inside a customized version of SilverStone Technology's uniquely horizontal FLP01 case. It's old, but it's new, but it's old, but not really, though? You get the idea. Contradictions are fun.
Instead of the expected SilverStone logo in the upper left portion of the front panel, there's a raised Maingear stamp that deliberately nods at the famous and similarly colorful Windows 95 insignia (the PC's default desktop image mirrors this). Below the retro-stylized Maingear logo, a bubbled 'Maingear Inside' decal harkens back to the ubiquitous 1991 Intel ad campaign. Very cute.
The FLP01 is a strangely wonderful—if prohibitively niche—chassis that's intentionally designed to invoke late '80s and early '90s tech nostalgia, so it seems a perfect fit for what Maingear is trying to do here. While I can't pinpoint an exact retro product inspiration for the case, its aesthetic mostly feels like a blanket tribute to computing's golden yesteryear, a general homage to dozens of comparable PCs I used for homework and proto-gaming when I was a kid. That was three-ish decades ago (yikes!), and while the nostalgia hurts in a scary way, I can respect a chassis company that takes this sort of creative design risk.
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Retro95
Unapologetically beige, the FLP01 is loaded with a conspicuous pair of front-facing, mock-floppy disk bays. Behind the first flap, Maingear has installed an optical DVD/CD drive on my review unit, and right underneath it sits the rig's 4TB mechanical HDD. When booting up the PC, you can hear both of these anachronistic accessories whir to life. What a trip. There's also a 4TB solid state drive affixed to the motherboard, mind you, so we've got 8TB of storage in total.
Behind the second faux front flap, there's a lineup of undeniably modern I/O: Two USB-A 3.0 ports, a single USB-C port, and a headphone/speaker jack. I love how easy it is to access these ports, but also, it's a sort of strange, out-of-place, but admittedly compelling experience to pull down a fake floppy disk drive cover to find some very current hardware inputs. It'd be like seeing a Wi-Fi 7 antennae on a Sega Dreamcast. Not a bad mod idea, actually, now that I think about it.
The case also features physical (and delightfully chunky) power and reset buttons that instantly take me back to my elementary school computer lab. There's even a pair of green and red indictor lights that communicate the on/off status of the machine and show when the mechanical hard drive (maybe?) is being accessed, just like the good old days.
More modern additions are things like air vents on the sides of the case, paired with molded covers that can easily pop off for quick dusting or deep cleaning, and there's plenty of openings for airflow across the back panel, too. The vented top panel is attached to the chassis by two simple screws and slides off for direct access to the internals.
Build
For a plethora of top-of-the-line guts, it's definitely a rather snug fit inside the FLP01, and because of its uniquely horizontal and retro-inspired design, the layout of components is, by dimensional mandate of sorts, pretty interesting.
For instance, the motherboard has to sit flush against the bottom immovable panel of the case, and there's no room to hide cables behind it, like you might do inside a proper PC tower. Additionally, there aren't traditional caged areas to mount mechanical or solid state hard drives anywhere, so the included HDD sits beneath the optical disc drive on a special bracket, and once everything is installed, this bracket unfortunately makes it difficult to fully access the motherboard. Basically, if I want to get your hands on the M.2 storage slots for future expansion, it'll be a royal pain in the Netscape, so minus one review point for inconvenience.
Moreover, due to the low headroom of the FLP01, a liquid AIO likely wouldn't fit, so a lower-profile air cooler has been used for the CPU here. Speaking of, the team did in fact mention to me that the reason they went with an RTX 5080 instead of a 5090 in this particular build was because of ongoing thermal concerns. Truthfully, a 5090 may have just barely fit inside the FLP01, but who knows how the peak operating temperature would have fared.
Retro95
Despite this, the chassis is, in fact, big enough to house a full-size motherboard, and the Retro95 boasts an ATX AsRock. The board has plenty of useful I/O, all of which you'd find on any other comparable modern PC, and plenty of additional M.2 slots as well. Still, the quirky nature of the FLP01's general dimensions does impose a few of the aforementioned hardware limitations.
Given these restrictions, I think Maingear has done an excellent job building and cable managing this rig. There's almost nowhere to hide cables in this case, other than under the optical drive/storage bracket, and even so, the internals of the Retro95 look incredibly clean and organized. All of the previous Maingear machines I've reviewed have sported excellent build-quality and cable management, so this isn't exactly a surprise. Moreso impressive, given the limitations of the chassis.
Here's everything that Maingear expertly jammed inside:
I think the Noctua fans—with their '80s-esque, brown, living room carpet aesthetic—are a nice retro touch. There are six in total (two 80mm at the rear, three 120mm at the sides, and one 120mm over the CPU) and they blend incredibly well within the FLP01. You can even see some of them from the outside of the case. This isn't to mention how whisper-quiet these fans are.
Furthermore, Wi-Fi 7 is a great inclusion, as is the 48GBs of memory, which is more than enough for gaming and most productivity/creative tasks. AMD's excellent Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU is no slouch, either.
Retro95
I additionally appreciate the copious amount of onboard storage. You just need a mechanical hard drive inside a throwback machine like this and Maingear delivered the retro goods. An actual floppy disk drive for old games would have been rad, though, as would a crusty 28K modem to use for dial-up internet. That is, if Earthlink still exists, God willing. At the end of the day, neither of these possibilities would have been as modernly useful as an optical disc drive, so I think Maingear made the right choice.
Would I have preferred a 5090 instead of a 5080? Absolutely, but I understand the omission. I wouldn't have turned away more RAM, though. I keep hundreds of Chrome tabs open at all times, just because.
Gaming and Performance
After initially booting up the Retro95, I felt it was only proper to start with some older games. Zero bloatware, by the way.
First, I played Oregon Trail and Number Munchers (how could I not?), and then I moved on to my extensive physical PS1 collection. Why? Because here's a lesser-known fact about modern optical drives: You can use emulators to run certain retro games directly off the original discs, and because I don't own any rotting PC titles from the way-back-when, that's exactly what I did.
The Oregon Trail
In a weird way, the Retro95 has helped me rediscover my love for the original PlayStation, and that's pretty rad. Turbo Prop Racing, Poy Poy, Driver, Sled Storm, Battle Arena Toshinden, Threads of Fate, Treasures of the Deep, Rage Racer—the list goes on and on, and it was such a joy to play these games again. Via the magic of emulation, they look fantastic. Plus, it's basically plug-and-play, so I don't need to go dig out my sad PS1 and figure out how to hook it up to my fancy monitor. I may never play PS1 games any other way. Quick, someone send this very important gaming announcement to a buddy on AIM.
Turbo Prop Racing
It's not exactly a stretch for an RTX 5080 to flawlessly run 32-bit console games from 30 years ago via emulation, but I did also test out a bunch of AAA heavy-hitters that put the included GPU through its paces.
Cyberpunk 2077, Ray Tracing: Overdrive Preset, DLSS Auto, 2x Frame Generation:
Doom: The Dark Ages, Ultra Nightmare Preset, DLSS Balanced, 2X Frame Generation:
Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Highest Preset, DLSS Balanced:
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Ultra Preset, Frame Generation On:
As you can see, with a little AI help, the 5080 inside the Retro95 can achieve pretty stable 4K/60fps gameplay. Natively, on the other hand, the card struggles at max settings in 4K, and really, this isn't a 5090, so I'm not shocked. This rig is great for playing games in 4K/60fps if you're cool with some DLSS boosting and frame generation, and it offers even better performance if you start chopping away at the settings.
Doom: The Dark Ages
But if you're wanting pure, raw 4K performance without the AI support, then the Retro95 won't be for you. After all, the build does cap out at a 5080. The good news is, however, that even when firing on all cylinders, the machine stays unbelievably quiet and relatively cool.
Conclusion
So what was I doing back in the year 1995? Well, pretty much the same thing I'm doing right now: Playing PlayStation games and surfing the 'Net, only I had homework to do and my bedtime was a lot earlier, except on Saturdays when I stayed up to watch SNICK.
Thus, Maingear's Retro95 provides a solid, funky-looking computer experience that brings back a lot of fond '90s memories for me, and it's impeccably well-built in a wacky case that absolutely screams nostalgia.
The optical disc drive is a lovely touch, as is the mechanical hard drive, and I dig how offbeat and horizontal the FLP01 is. If I had an old VGA monitor, I'd for sure place it directly on top, but there's currently no practical reason to do this, so we'll leave some of the aging tech where it belongs: In the past.
Retro95
The build does indeed suffer without the inclusion of an RTX 5090, but this is more due to physical limitations of the case than anything else, so I understand. The Retro95 is still a gaming powerhouse, especially if you don't mind tinkering with modest settings and DLSS, and it sports a kitschy aesthetic that will speak directly to midlife gamers like myself.
I'm sure the youth will stay far away from this time-traveling pseudo-relic, because there's no garish RGB and it's a statement piece that might be too frumpy for streamlined, modern setups. But what do Gen Z know, anyway? I guess you had to be there, kids. To the other Millennials: We really did have everything, didn't we?
As of this writing, the Retro95 is currently available on the Maingear website. It starts at $1,599, and you can configure it with CPUs from both Intel and AMD, up to a GeForce RTX 5080 CPU, 96GB of DDR5 memory, 8TB of Gen4 NVMe storage, Noctua fans and an 850W PSU.
I'm told the number of rigs are limited, so if you're interested in reliving the tubular '90s with some pizza rolls in one hand and a ream of expired Chuck E. Cheese tickets in the other, it might be good to act sooner rather than later.
Disclosure: Maingear provided review product for coverage purposes.