Maingear F131 Review: A High Performance Gaming PC Masterpiece

by Dave Altavilla — Tuesday, May 29, 2018, 12:22 PM EDT

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Maingear F131 3DMark And Unigene Graphics Benchmarks

Futuremark’s graphically intense 3DMark Fire Strike is designed specifically for Gaming PCs. It has both Normal and Extreme modes: Normal runs at 1920x1080, while Extreme runs at 2560x1440 and is intended for high end gaming PCs.

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike

Simulated Gaming Performance

The benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a high quality depth of field filter. We tested the Maingear F131 on the Extreme preset and compared it to an array of systems on our database.

3DMark Fire Strike benchmark Maingear F131

Pair an ultra-powerful processor with a couple of overclocked GeForce GTX 1080 Tis, chilled by a custom liquid cooling setup that easily keeps temperatures in check, and you end up with the highest overall 3DMark score we have seen to date. The Maingear F131 takes the overall lead here by a decent margin and trailed in only one CPU-limited test (GT1) by less than 1.7%.

We should note that 3DMark did fail and drop us to the apps home screen on a couple of occasions with the F131, but we never narrowed down the cause. We are unsure if it was a result of the overclock or some sort of driver / software incompatibility, but we were able to complete multiple runs and other game benchmarks and applications ran without issue.

Unigine Heaven and Valley

DirecX11 Gaming Performance

Unigine's Heaven 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. It features hardware tessellation with DirectX 11 and focuses solely on the GPU with real-time global illumination, screen space ambient occlusion, volumetric clouds, and adjustable settings. Valley offers a similar evaluation, and like Heaven it can be used both as a benchmark and a stress testing tool.

Unigine Heaven 4.0

The Maingear F131 pulled off another first-place finish in the Unigine Heaven benchmark. Its combination of a powerful processor, with overclocked GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards in SLI propel the system out into the lead by a few hundred points versus the closest competitor.