Late-’90s desktops hummed under desks in beige towers that always felt heavier than they should. CRTs flickered, CD drives whirred, and somewhere in every PC gamer’s mind lived a fantasy build they only saw in shop windows or magazine ads. The gap between the family PC that struggled with Quake and the dream rig you sketched in notebooks, complete with turbo buttons and drive bays, felt impossibly wide.
Maingear’s Retro98 is that fantasy finally built. The limited-run sleeper PC uses a retro beige SilverStone tower with a working turbo button and keyed power lockout, but hides 2026 hardware inside. The pitch is simple: 1998 on the outside, 2026 inside. It is the machine your younger self would have lost their mind over if they could see past the beige and understood what an RTX 5070 even meant.
Designer: Maingear
Water-cooled Retro98α
Retro98 feels more like a drop than a product line. Maingear limited it to 38 units: 32 standard builds and six water-cooled Retro98α rigs with braided ketchup-and-mustard cables. The brand positions it as something you will not find at a big-box store, and points out that you will not even find a Radio Shack next week. Each system is hand-built by a single technician, making it feel closer to a limited sneaker release than a typical prebuilt.
Even the lowest spec overshoots anything you could have imagined in 1998. The Retro98 5070 pairs an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 with an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K, 32 GB of DDR5 at 6000 MT/s, and a 2 TB NVMe SSD. This is the kind of machine that runs Cyberpunk smoothly while looking like it should be loading StarCraft from a stack of jewel cases on the desk.
Of course, the front-panel rituals matter as much as the internals. The keyed power lock feels like something your parents would have used to keep you off the PC, and the fully functional turbo button now toggles performance profiles instead of pretending to overclock a 486. These physical interactions turn booting up into a tiny ceremony, a reminder of when pressing power felt like entering a different world rather than unlocking another screen.
Behind the retro faceplate, you still get modern conveniences. USB-C on the front, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and a clean Windows 11 install without bloatware. The machine is not trying to recreate the pain of driver floppies or IRQ conflicts. It is just borrowing the shell and the attitude. You get the look and the jokes, but you also get quiet fans, instant game launches, and none of the frustration.
Retro98 is not about value per frame but about finally owning the mythical beige tower you stared at in catalogs. It is for people who remember sharing a/s/l in chat rooms and slapping CRTs after another buffer underrun, and who now have the budget to indulge that memory. A beige box with a turbo button probably should not feel fresh in 2026, but somehow it does, which says more about how boring glass-and-RGB towers have gotten than it does about nostalgia.
