Maingear Special Edition Battlebox Starts at $2,999

Maingear introduced special editions of the F131, SHIFT and VYBE gaming "Battlebox" desktops that feature Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan Z graphics card. The VYBE has a starting price of $2,999, the F131 starts at $3,199, and the SHIFT starts at $3,499.

The criteria for designation as Battlebox consists of 4K gaming machines that have at least GeForce GTX 780 or TITAN graphics cards in 2- and 3-Way SLI configurations. Also included are overclocked Intel Haswell i5 and i7 CPUs, advanced cooling systems, high-speed DDR3 RAM to assist with overclocking, and the latest high-speed SSDs. DigitalStorm, Maingear, Origin PC and Falcon Northwest offer Battleboxes here in North America, as well.

The GTX Titan Z cards offered in the special edition Battleboxes include 5,760 CUDA cores, a base clock of 705 MHz, a boost clock of 876 MHz, and a texture fill rate of 338 billion per second. Also included is 12 GB of GDDR5 VRAM with a memory speed of 7.0 Gbps, a memory bandwidth of 672 GB/sec, and a 768-bit memory interface width (384-bit per GPU).

To give you a sense of the base specifications, the most expensive of the three, the SHIFT Battlebox, comes packed with an Intel Core i5-4590 processor (3.3 GHz / 3.7 GHz), 8 GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 RAM (2 x 4 GB), Nvidia's GeForce Titan Z with 12 GB of GDDR5 VRAM (2x Titan Z 24 GB GDDR5 in SLI is an extra $2,050), and a 750 watt EVGA SuperNOVA 80 Plus Certified PSU. Other features include a 1 TB Seagate SSHD with 8 GB of caching, a 24x DVD burner, 7.1 channel high definition surround sound, and Windows 8.1 64-bit.

The specs for the VYBE can be found here, and the F131 specs can be found here.

Acknowledging that we're primarily a DIY site, it's always interesting to see what boutique builders like Maingear are marketing to customers not interested in hand-building their own PC from scratch. A starting price of $3,499 seems a little steep, as you could probably buy a decent used car for that money. Still, there are plenty of PC gamers who will pay top dollar to have the top-of-the-line performance machine.

UPDATE: We've reached out to Maingear about the pricing. The cost of all three special editions seems a bit off given that the Titan Z typically sells for $2,999 on its own. Origin, it seems, has a similar discounted deal too on Titan Z systems.

Follow Kevin Parrish @exfileme. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.