Maingear has proved that all-in-ones can be used for gaming too

Most of the PC gaming enthusiasts I’ve met in my life would never even consider getting an all-in-one for a number of reasons, the primary one being that it has almost as many limitations as a laptop, but without the benefit of portability. Gaming laptops make sense for a gamer that’s always on the move, but if you’re willing to buy a gaming all-in-one, you might as well just buy a regular tower and a separate monitor. At least, that’s how things used to be, but Maingear may have changed things with the Alpha 34. This recently-unveiled computer is the first enticing gaming all-in-one I’ve ever seen, mainly because its doesn’t seem to sacrifice anything in the way of power, and it comes at the relatively affordable price of $2000. 

I’ve never been keen on the idea of abandoning my tower case for a system with all the gaming guts piggy-backing a monitor, but when the monitor in question is a 34 inch curved ultra HD affair and the guts are full-sized and water-cooled I start feeling a bit swayed. That’s Maingear’s newly-announced Alpha 34, an all-in-one gaming PC that doesn’t mess about when it comes to the question of future-proofing. Long-gone are the days when buying a monitor-contained system meant working with what you purchased until it all goes obsolete. Users can swap out their video card, upgrade their ram and replace their processor to their hearts’ content. They probably won’t need to for quite some time though. The Alpha 34 comes standard with a combination of Intel 5960X processors, NVIDIA 980Ti, Titan X or AMD Radeon R9 390X graphics and 32GB of Kingston memory, which is basically everything you need at this moment, unless you’re keen on multiple graphics cards. So it’s a powerful system with a monitor pumping out 3840 x 1440 resolution, all done quietly thanks to a closed-loop liquid cooling system. Oh, and it has an upgradeable webcam, in case you were worried about clipping a thing to the top.