Digital Trends

Maingear Dash April 16th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

First Boot and Gaming

Once the machine was up and running, we were quite pleased with its performance and silent operation. It booted to the Windows Vista desktop in 53 seconds, which is better than average. Maingear even offers customized boot and shutdown menus with its logo, which is slick. We were very pleased to see an extremely lean installation of Vista too, with zero bloatware installed. The only extra links on the desktop were to free anti-virus software and free office suite software, which is fine with us as those are useful programs.

Furthermore, the Dash’s general performance in Windows was excellent, as the system was extremely responsive and felt very fast in testing. Its Windows Experience Index is a decent 4.1, and the Dash scored a solid 3,787 in PCMark Vantage, which isn’t too shabby considering its relatively low price tag.

Though the Dash isn’t billed as a gaming rig, and is essentially running a $50 videocard combined with onboard graphics, it is actually capable of decent gaming performance, which surprised us. We were able to play Call of Duty 4, Portal and Crysis just fine on the system, albeit at low resolution. Still, that’s an impressive feat for a machine with specs like this. For number junkies, we ran 3DMark 06 as well, and the PC scored 2,220, which is on the low end of the scale, but not surprising given the unit’s specs.

Upgrades

Finally, given the design of the chassis interior we were curious as to how a user would go about upgrading or swapping out parts, since the PSU resides over the CPU area and the hard drives are not easily accessible since they lie on the floor. Here’s what the Dash looks like with its door removed.

The PSU is mounted above the CPU, with the hard drive(s) down below on the bottom of the chassis.

Given the chassis’ unique design, and the fact that it’s targeted towards “friends and family,” we expected to find simple, clear instructions on how to add another hard drive, swap out the PSU, etc. But Maingear doesn’t provide any instructions at all. Instead, the company includes the Silverstone manual in a small box that comes with the system, and though the manual is somewhat easy to follow, the pictures are tiny and a lot of the diagrams resemble schematic drawings, making it far from user-friendly, in other words. Frankly, it would not be difficult for Maingear to add a few pages to the manual depicting how to add and remove components from the chassis, and given its atypical layout, we’re sure the effort would be greatly appreciated.

Speaking of upgrades, if one were to go down that path, we give Maingear props for the excellent wiring in the Dash. It’s incredibly clean, and all excess cabling is neatly zip-tied and out of the way. Clean cabling has always been a hallmark of the boutique PC experience, so it’s good to see a high-end feature like that come to such an affordable alternative.

Conclusion

The Dash is an interesting concept, and we think Maingear has largely done a very good job with it. Picture it as sort of a “mini-boutique” rig that looks like a custom PC and performs like one, plus includes the same high-quality tech support (we say this based on our previous experience with the company) as a hand-built machine, but costs much less. That’s a winning package for sure, and we’d easily recommend the Dash over a low-end Dell, HP or similar big-name vendor’s offerings without hesitation. Sure, there are still several areas in which Maingear can improve the customer experience, as we noted in our review. Once Maingear irons out the documentation, there is nothing stopping this system from receiving our coveted Editor's Choice award.



Pros:

• Very quiet, small and light
• Decent gaming performance
• Affordable

Cons:

• Needs better setup guide
• Upgrade instructions would be appreciated
• Not as muscular as average boutique PC