I've spent more than a decade testing gaming PCs, and even the best pre-builts usually have cables you simply can't hide. That made my first look inside Maingear's new Zero genuinely surprising, even after my previous Maingear MG-1 review.

There's almost nothing there. Power connections have been moved behind the motherboard, the panoramic glass is uninterrupted, and the components that normally compete with bundles of cabling finally get the spotlight. It's one of the cleanest pre-built PCs I've tested.

Clean doesn't necessarily mean better, though. After a few weeks of gaming, benchmarking, stress testing, and poking around inside, I wanted to know whether Maingear's cable-free approach actually improves the PC or simply makes for prettier photos.

Maingear sent Windows Central a review unit on loan for testing. It had no input, nor saw the contents of this review, prior to publication.

My review unit is an extreme $8,676 configuration built around AMD's Ryzen 7 9850X3D and NVIDIA's RTX 5090 Founders Edition. Don't let that price scare you away from the Zero entirely, though. Here's what Maingear packed into my high-end loaner:

But you don't need to spend anywhere near $8,676 to get the Zero's signature design. Models start at $2,799, with the baseline configuration landing you the same Zero MK.II case, an Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus CPU, NVIDIA RTX 5070 FE GPU, 32GB DDR5-6000 RAM, 2TB SSD, and a 360mm AiO.

That starting price is more competitive than I expected. A comparable DIY build came to roughly $2,850 when I priced it out, putting it remarkably close to Maingear's $2,799 starting price.

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