Razer’s been planning a modular gaming PC for quite a very long time. First, there was Project Christine, a very over the top ambitious project revealed in 2014 that never came to fruition, then the Tomahawk, which Razer revealed at CES back in January and is going up for preorder this month.
The Tomahawk is a very piece of tech all together compared to Project Christine. Razer’s first vision of a modular PC consisted of a comlete bunch of water-cooled modules, or cartridge-like parts for each part—storage, GPU, CPU, optical drive. In comparison, the Tomahawk is basically a custom fitting for Intel’s NUC 9 Extreme Kit (aka Ghost Canyon NUC).
It takes less than a minute to creat a Tomahawk, as Gizmodo shown earlier this year. All you do is plug in a NUC 9 Extreme into one of the two PCI Express slots, which itself comes with the CPU, RAM, motherboard, and storage, and then put in a graphics card in the other PCIe slot. Then push the “sled” into the box. That’s it, you’re finished creating your own PC.
Assembly is not required. Razer is trying to sell a pre-configured model with an Intel Core i9 9980HK processor, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD + 2TB HDD, and packed up with a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card.
That’s a laptop CPU, a fast one with 8 cores and 16 threads clocked at 2.4GHz to 5GHz. Comes with the other components, and in particular a GeForce RTX 3080 and you’d have yourself a high-end gaming rig.
The chassis is made from CNC-milled, anodized aluminum with Razer’s Chroma RGB lighting donning the bottom. It measures 210mm x 150mm x 365mm and can fit a full-size graphics card, powered by a 750W SFX power supply unit.
For connectivity, it comes with up to four USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, two USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports, two gigabit LAN ports, and a 3.5mm rear speakers/TOSLINK combo port. And on the wireless side, you get Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) connectivity.
The Tomahawk is very intriguing, but its not cheap. Its pricing will start at $2,400 and it will be up for preorder this month, and you will need to add your own GPU to that setup. If you want it with a GeForce RTX 3080 installed, will cost you around $3,200.
