MAINGEAR LIV: an emergency pulmonary ventilator at 1/4 the cost

Super high-end custom PC builder MAINGEAR responds to coronavirus with LIV ventilator.

Anthony Garreffa

Gaming Editor

Published Apr 9, 2020 6:39 AM CDT
Updated Nov 3, 2020 11:44 AM CST

1-minute read time

MAINGEAR is known in the United States as one of the highest-end custom gaming PC makers, but the company has quickly pivoted to respond to the novel coronavirus pandemic with the release of the LIV -- a new ventilator being made on the cheap.

MAINGEAR is shifting over a certain allocation of its manufacturing capabilities, to help New York City and its overwhelmed intensive care units. MAINGEAR developed the new LIV ventilator in-house with medical advisers in just a matter of weeks, all while using off-the-shelf parts that can be "produced for approximately a quarter of the price" of a regular ventilator.

MAINGEAR LIV ventilator: $7500
Regular ventilator: starts at $50,000

The company is now awaiting FDA clearance, with MAINGEAR ready to start delivering its new LIV ventilator in as little as two weeks from now. MAINGEAR is using an "easy to use touchscreen interface", where the company has used an NVIDIA Shield rocking custom software and "redundant power supplies".

Awesome to see, and kudos goes out to our friends at MAINGEAR in Wallace Santos and Rahul Sood.

MAINGEAR LIV: an emergency pulmonary ventilator at 1/4 the cost 13

Anthony Garreffa

Gaming Editor

Anthony joined TweakTown in 2010 and has since reviewed 100s of tech products. Anthony is a long time PC enthusiast with a passion of hate for games built around consoles. FPS gaming since the pre-Quake days, where you were insulted if you used a mouse to aim, he has been addicted to gaming and hardware ever since. Working in IT retail for 10 years gave him great experience with custom-built PCs. His addiction to GPU tech is unwavering and has recently taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware.

Anthony's PC features Intel's Core i5-12600K paired with the GIGABYTE Z690 AERO-G, Corsair's 32GB DDR4-3200, and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 FE. It runs Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus 4TB with Windows 11 Pro, housed in Lian Li's O11 Dynamic XL, and powered by ASUS's ROG Strix 850W. Accessories include the Logitech G915 Wireless keyboard, Logitech G502X Wireless mouse, and LG C3 48-inch OLED TV 4K 120Hz monitor.