Maingear F131 Review: A High Performance Gaming PC Masterpiece

Maingear gives you the royal treatment with the F131, so to speak. There's a care package that arrives in the box that advises you not to go it alone. Sound advice we suppose, especially since some of the gear in the box is fairly essential.

In here you've got a myriad of different items, including things like the Wi-Fi antenna for the MSI motherboard and assorted bundled cabling for motherboard I/O and the EVGA SuperNOVA 1200 Watt power supply. There's associated literature as well, including the requisite motherboard manual for the MSI X299M Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard, as well as a quick start guide and rear panel I/O cheat sheet from Maingear. And you also get tons of Maingear swag from a fabric and rubber mouse pad, to a Maingear tee, stickers, buttons, a pen, all the gimmes, all the swags and yes, a swag bag for it all too. We also got a Maingear hat in the box. The idea here is, if you've ponied-up for an F131, "welcome to the family," as it says on the inside of the box.

Finally, there's a RGB remote control waiting inside the box and it's fairly obviously what it does...

If that does't get your disco on, we're not sure what will. You can set the lighting to (approximate) any color on the remote in a steady state, or to cycle through them or fade, with the ability to adjust speed of transitions as well. You also can adjust brightness and turn off lighting completely. The effect, as you can see, is pretty impressive and though we would like to have the ability to integrate it with RGB peripherals and perhaps control it from a Windows app as well, Maingear tells us they're working on that functionality for a possible future update to the F131. 

Lastly, Maingear's software setup is very clean and free of any bloat whatsoever. The only two utilities beyond Windows 10 and associated drivers, are MSI's Afterburner app for GPU clock tweaking and G.Skill's Trident RGB Memory lighting app, which also lets you tweak your memory stick bling. Again, as we noted earlier, our GPUs were goosed with factory overclocks that resulted in a 2035MHz core clock and 5085MHz on the memory clock of the two GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards installed in our system. Side note: perhaps it's curious Maingear didn't setup Windows 10 Pro on such a high end machine, but it's frankly not something most end users will concern themselves with, though you do of course have the option to select Pro when configuring a build at Maingear's site.

But enough chit-chat about hardware and software, let's look at performance next...