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If you thought all-in-ane PCs were lame and not worth your time, Maingear has i for CES 2016 that may finally catch your attending, although your wallet may cry out in hurting as a upshot. The Alpha 34 is no ordinary AIO (all-in-i) desktop. For starters, it's built around a 34-inch curved display with iii,840-by-1,440-pixel resolution. That's 7 inches larger and one,280 extra pixels across compared with your boilerplate 1440p 27-inch display.

Having a giant screen is great, but means nothing if you lot tin't play the latest titles at max settings. And as a proper gaming PC, it appears y'all can configure the heck out of this thing. The options include Intel CPUs up to and including 8-core Farthermost Edition and 18-core Xeon processors; Nvidia Titan X or 980Ti GPUs, or if y'all're an AMD fan, a Radeon R9 390X option; 32GB of Kingston DDR4 RAM, and a Samsung 950 Pro Yard.ii NVME SSD with a claimed 2.5Gbps read speed.

Maingear Alpha 34

Maingear also bills the Alpha 34 every bit upgradable, as it's assembled with standard desktop components and non bite-size, soldered-in mobile fries. Information technology can fit full-size desktop gaming and workstation graphics cards (although we couldn't find a maximum length for the GPU). Inside the chassis is closed loop liquid cooling instead of a giant array of fans. The Alpha 34 comes in a blackness brushed aluminum cease to start, simply for $299 to $399 yous tin can customize it in a diverseness of colors.

A few downsides nosotros can see immediately: Maingear bills the Alpha 34 equally an entertainment center as well, but we're not feeling it. For example, you lot're non going to want to watch 16:9-ratio movies on the Alpha 34, because they're going to look downright strange, with giant black confined on either side. 21:9 Cinemascope volition be a bit better, but you'll still have some black bars on the sides.

Maingear Alpha 34

As well, Maingear says that configurations start at $1,999, which sounds reasonable for a gaming all-in-1 desktop. Just that'due south nowhere most the configuration y'all're going to really want, because that price only gets y'all a Core i3, a 1TB 7200rpm hard disk drive, and an AMD R7 360X, with no mouse, keyboard, webcam, or wireless networking. It might equally well be an empty hulk. Starting with the $2,699 configuration, you crash-land to an ASRock X99E-ITX motherboard and a Core i7 5820K at 3.3GHz, although yous're nevertheless sitting at a 1TB HDD and an R7 360X; you'll need an extra $385 for an R9 390X and a whopping $650 for a GTX 980 Ti. Merely $51 puts you in a Samsung 850 EVO (250GB), only a 512GB 950 Pro costs $376.

In other words, the Alpha 34 looks awesome, but it looks more similar an awesome $3,500 AIO gaming PC — and once yous're in that range, yous're once again faced with the decision of paying actress for the all-in-ane chassis versus just building your own custom PC and buying a giant monitor separately. And the math always works out in favor of the latter, although at to the lowest degree this time y'all're not sacrificing operation.

The Alpha 34 ways y'all can boast a liquid-cooled eight-core gaming PC with a Titan X and 1TB SSD, merely only if you've got at least $4,771 called-for a pigsty in your pocket. And that 18-cadre Xeon? Prices get-go at $seven,704 for that model with 16GB RAM and an Nvidia Quadro K620. Knock yourself out at Maingear'southward Alpha 34 configuration page.