14 DAY TRIAL // Despite what others would have you believe, you don't actually need one of Intel's overpowered Core-series chips to play the latest games at full graphics settings. You can make do with weaker chips, or AMD's corresponding APUs, as long as you have a good graphics card.
When it made the Spark, Maingear latched onto this fact and pushed it as far as it could go. The result was what the company describes as “the smallest, lightest, and most versatile gaming PC solution MAINGEAR has ever offered.”
You probably wouldn't expect this thing's hardware to fit inside a case barely larger than your mouse, but the company did it, somehow.
A quad-core AMD A8-5557M accelerated processing unit (APU) with a clock of 2.1 GHz 93.1 GHz Turbo Core) is paired with an AMD Radeon R9 M275X discrete GPU (normally used in laptops), plus a pair of DDR3 SO-DIMM memory slots (up to 16 GB of 1600/1333 MHz DDR3).
There's an mSATA SSD as well (512 GB), plus an HDD of 2.5 inches, Gigabit LAN, and lots of other things, all the connectors you could possibly think of.
Everything somehow fits in a tiny case of 4.5 x 2.34 x 4.23 inches / 114 x 59.43 x 107.4 mm and weighs 0.89 pounds / 0.40 kilos. All of it, plus four free games that would normally set you back $200 / €149, sells for $699 / €522.
As usual, energy efficiency is ensured via dynamic graphics switching technology. When you're playing a game, the Radeon R9 M275X GDDR5 2 GB GPU is working. The rest of the time, though, it is inert, leaving things in the hands of the integrated GPU of the A8-5557M APU (web browsing, doc editing, book reading, etc.).
Needless to say, WiFi (with 802.11ac) and Bluetooth 4.0 are included, via an add-in card that occupies a half-size mini PCI Express slot. Through support of the IEEE802.11b/g/n and /ac standards, it can access both the 2.4 GHz and 5GHz bands, while the Bluetooth: v4.0/ 3.0+HS interface is capable of 2402MHz~2483MHz.
Other interfaces include mSATA, two video ports (HDMI and mini DisplayPort), and, for I/O, four USB 3.0, one of each RJ45, Audio, and Kensington lock.
The Maingear Spark runs on the energy provided by the 135W power supply (AC 100-240V, Output: DC 19V, 7.1A input power). As for the operating system, you get to decide between Windows 7, Professional, or Ultimate 64-bit or Windows 8.1.
