CEO of MAINGEAR (Guest Telegrams)

Maingear as an SI is fairly large; but small compared to the big OEM's. Wondering if you can give some insights into the variance for margins on hardware over the last two years. When the GPU clusterfuck happened was the company insulated somewhat from that with long lead times on orders and contracts that were signed years ago; or was there just less margins for the company and some higher costs passed on to the consumer. Being a private company there was no public knowledge of profit margins or revenue but wondering if the shortage was still profitable for an SI? Thanks!

Hi I saw the GN review of one of your pre-builts I was glad to see no proprietary form factors, psu standards etc As you can tell I'm not a far of anti consumer practices Does maingear have a policy on only using standard consumer hardware?

Alex

Hi Wallace & Tom, My question is around the laptop space and working with Tongfang (now uniwill I think). How do you decide which of their products you want to sell and how much customization do you do? How do you differentiate your products from say Eluktronics who appears to have similar offerings but with a different retail model? Do they ever consult with you in the product development phase and how much market research do you do in the laptop space around consumer demand (i.e. specs, features, etc). I've seen XMG be very active on reddit in soliciting consumer feedback

B. Fish

Hi Tom and Wallace, With the comeback of Intel on 12th Gen CPUs how has the consumer demand between AMD and Intel shifted? Does an more even playfield in performance help companies like Maingear as there are more incentives for big hardware players to lower their prices/give incentives? And is there a similar situation in demand with the launch of RDNA 2 vs Ampere in the prebuild space or do the customers just buy the Geforce sticker ;)

Polarde

Hi Wallace, Apart from customer demand and sales, what determines which CPUs and GPUs you offer? I see that most of your pre-builds come with AMD CPUs - did the switch from Intel to AMD surprise you and what trends are you currently seeing? How much interest are you seeing for Intel GPUs?

Chris Rijk

Maybe "Wallace and Tomit" ?

Moore's Law Is Dead

Hi Tom and Wallace, do you see any rise or fall in popularity of small form factor pre-built gaming desktops when considering ever increasing TDPs of GPUs?

Silvannos

Hi Wallace and Tom it - (very poor attempt at a Wallace and Gromit joke). Whilst I don't remember all of the outcomes (except in Dell's case, who could forget), what was your reaction to the series of Secret Shopper videos produced by Linus Tech Tips? Both in terms of how MAINGEAR was represented and also your industry as a whole. Did you find the videos insightful, entertaining, embarrassing, etc? How would you respond to the LTT community who saw the video (if you haven't already)?

Ryzza5

As an avid fan of gaming laptops, it kinda sucks that we're always constrained by thermal temperatures. it's quite clear that as GPUs get more powerful, TDP also tends to increase. How challenging do you think it will be to cool high-end gaming laptops, especially considering the next-gen of GPUs will come with a significant increase in power consumption?

ManBearPig

What effect do reviews of your systems have on your systems? Does your procedure go out of there way to appeal to the perception of the case or are you guys just about making your version a "great" PC build?

Swiggles

Hi Tom and Wallace, MAINGEAR is a brand I have been looking at for over 10 years. Up until lately I have always enjoyed building my own. The builds are very pretty and clean. What are your thoughts about the Steam Deck vs Desktop vs Laptop in general? (NOTE: Waiting for mine here in Q2 and look to use it while traveling for work a lot) If Steam Deck/SteamOS really takes off this time (unlike the previous Debian based SteamOS years back) would MAINGEAR look to make their own version of the Steam Deck? Any thoughts as to what hardware (screen size/type, etc.) you'd want to see in th next version or in a MAINGEAR Deck? Thank you both!

(tired) Gaming Dad

So how many gears does Maingear have? Is it a 5-speed gearbox or is it more like an automatic transmission of awesomeness?

Wizard West

Greetings Wallace and guest (sorry Tom, love the content <3). Given the massive increase in TDPs on upcoming GPUs, have you considered things like using flow guides or internally-mounted fans (see: Puget Systems directing air with internal fan mounts, using acrylic plates to guarantee a minimum airflow over GPUs, etc)? I don't expect it to be that drastic of a problem, but I want to her your view on these secondary cooling measures and what it would take to get you to the point of using them.

Gwen Farron