Maingear Rush Review With Radeon R9 295X2 CrossFire

Performance Summary: Although at times the Maingear Rush delivered blistering scores in our benchmarks and on occasion outpaced the competition by large margins, it didn’t quite top the charts in every test. Granted, it was up against phenomenal competition (all of which had the same CPU), but you want a top-shelf rig like this one to handle everything.

And in fact, it did handle almost everything we threw at it. In two tests, though, with all the settings cranked up at a 4K resolution, it did fail to post playable framerates with the ultra-high image quality settings used.

You can’t beat this thing in the looks department though, and indeed a high-end rig such as this should look as expensive as it is. The paint job is incredible, the lighting is perfect, and somehow Maingear even managed to match all the components, from the motherboard, to the GPUs, to the DIMMs and the fans.

It also proved capable of the performance promised by its drool-worthy components--the Intel Core i7-4960X, the RAID 0 SSDs, the quad-channel RAM, and last but not least the dual AMD Radeon R9 295X2 graphics cards resulting in a Quad-CrossFire configuration--as well as the factory overclock.

Maingear also somehow managed to build a relatively quiet machine. You tend to expect a lot of noise from all those high-end components, but the Rush starts quiet and never escalates much beyond that, no matter the load.

We should note that we ran into some stability problems in testing, most likely caused by the factory overclock. Some caused BSODs while others resulted in a hung benchmark, but it was a problem in any case. We do not believe all systems with this configuration would suffer from the same issues, however. Maingear is known for producing top notch rigs--this particular one simply misbehaved a bit.

With a rig that requires this much juice to operate, you can’t necessarily just plug it into a crowded power strip. You may need to be careful about what other electronics are on that circuit, and Maingear suggested that anyone using a Rush should run through a UPS to ensure clean power.

The company knows how to build a great system. We found that to be the case with the Rush’s sibling, the Maingear Epic Rush and a handful of other Maingear rigs we've tested over the years. However, considering that the Epic Rush costs over two grand less than the Rush and we didn't run into any issues with it, you may prefer the latter--unless you're the type that prefers to go all-out and ride the bleeding edge, budget be damned.

  

Killer paint job and design Incredible performance at times           Exceptionally quiet Great warranty and support	Stability issues Price