MAINGEAR’s Haswell-Based SHIFT Gaming Rig Beats Older SHIFTs On Both Price and Performance

It’s Haswell time in a major way, and the latest custom PC builder to update its entire line with 4th-generation Intel Core (Haswell) processors is MAINGEAR. The company announced that its SHIFT, F131, Potenza, and Vybe desktops in addition to its Nomad 15 and Nomad 17 gaming notebooks will all sport the new Intel chips.

MAINGEAR also pushed the latest SHIFT’s selling points by comparing it to previous generations of custom SHIFT rigs. Unsurprisingly, the 2013 version obliterates the 2009 and 2010 version, but MAINGEAR is trying to make a point, which is that for as substantial as the performance increase is with the new Haswell system, it actually costs less than the other two systems.

MAINGEAR SHIFT

The 2009 SHIFT as configured was $3,473, and the 2010 system was $2,728, while the 2013 SHIFT comes in at just $2,517. (What, 2012’s $7,570 MAINGEAR SHIFT Super Stock X79 system wasn’t deemed worthy for comparison?)

MAINGEAR Haswell

The Haswell-based SHIFT features an Intel Core i7-4770K, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti, 16GB of DDR3 memory, and a 480GB M500 SSD.