Maingear’s Custom Apex Art PC Cases Are So Pretty They’ll Make You Forget What’s Inside Them

Half the reason you shell out the thousands of dollars for a pre-built PC tower is for the convenience. The other half is the aesthetics. CES 2025 has already inundated us with pre-built PCs, but the folk at Maingear may have the most eye-catching designs we’ve seen so far. The new Apex line is absolutely stealing the show, not the least because of the custom artwork.

I very much enjoyed the build quality of the Maingear’s MG-1, though I didn’t appreciate the loose LED lighting strip inside. The Maingear Apex Rush line isn’t the top-end PC on offer, but they’re really premium on custom artwork. At the top of the heap for me is that “Vaporwave” artwork that immediately reminds me of the hours I spent vegetating in my cousin’s basement playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The “Cybergamer” variant has a style very reminiscent of Ghost in a Shell or other 80s- and 90s-era SciFi anime. The “Good Fortune” design is a cutesy collage of various “lucky” animals from various Asian cultures. No, it’s not my jam, but I can appreciate the effort putting the design on these cases.

The Maingear Apex Rush’s components are housed in the Lian-li 011 EVO RGB mid-sized tower with the fishbowl design that’s so popular nowadays. You can get them with either AMD or Intel, plus up to 48 GB of DDR5 800MHz RAM, a GeForce RTX 50-series GPU, and up to a 1600W PSU. The liquid cooling tubing is either vinyl or neoprene with the optional braided sleeve. That, or you can opt for the metal hard tubing.

If you don’t care for the custom artwork and prefer to actually see your PC components, then the top-of-the line Apex Force PC features enough parallel lines to make an engineer blush. The Apex Force includes two 420 mm by 60 mm radiators connected to a custom pipe network that reminds me of a past era of PCs where the internals looked like a car engine. Everything, including the single-loop cooling system, is built on a 10-degree angle to match the angle of the Phanteks NV9 full-sized tower. You can choose which colors you want, and even select a different piping material like copper.

The issue with these kinds of systems was the threat of leakage and the difficulty draining the coolant. On that end, Maingear said there’s a quick-drain valve under the side panel that makes it easy to remove for the sake of self-maintenance. You can get the Apex Force either a Z890 or X970E motherboard with the standard selection of top-end Intel or AMD CPU, up to 64 GB of RAM, and up to the Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU. To give the graphics card its juice, you may need to opt for the 1,600W 80+ Platinum PSU

You can preorder the new Apexs with a refundable $100 reservation, but either way these are going to be pricey PCs. The company didn’t share pricing or release date, though you should expect them sometime early this year.

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