Maingear is following a different tack on high-end PCs Thursday by releasing the Remix, a mid-tower PC built specifically as a creative workstation. The system is tailored most towards visual editors and can come with a Quadro CX video card to accelerate filters, H.264 video encoding, and other features in Adobe's CS4 suite as well as other apps that recognize NVIDIA's CUDA acceleration language. Musicians are also catered to with sound insulation to cut down on fan noise and a built-in M-Audio PCI interface for recording instruments.

The Remix is based entirely on Intel's newer Core i7 processors and starts out at $2,000 with a 2.66GHz version of the quad-core chip, 3GB of DDR3 memory, a 250GB hard drive, a 256MB Quadro FX 570 video card and a 750W power supply to handle the workload. Adding the Quadro CX boosts the price to $4,000, while options exist for up to a 3.2GHz Core i7 Extreme, 12GB of memory and more exotic storage options that include one or more 300GB VelociRaptor drives, Intel 80GB solid-state drives and Blu-ray. Orders start today.