For many years, Razer have been talking about modular gaming PCs that feature plug ‘n play components. This dream has yet to be fully realised despite many attempts, and has been left in the hands of the savvier members of the PC gaming community to figure out.
Razer believes that it may finally have figured out the kinks with modular PC gaming, and has revealed its Tomahawk PC. The Tomahawk features a simple and small case design that includes two PCIe slots: one for a full-sized GPU, and one for an Intel NUC Element board that contains the CPU, the RAM, the storage, and basically everything else you need for a functional PC.
The NUC module includes a 45W Core i9-9980HK Coffee Lake processor, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, a 512GB NVMe SSD, and a 2TB hard drive. The memory and storage are upgradable, but the CPU is not — unless Intel releases another compatible NUC board that you can swap directly into the Tomahawk. It’s not exactly a completely hot-swappable machine, but one that is a lot simpler in design than most computers. That you cannot swap out the processor currently though is a huge negative considering how it will likely also get out of date over time.
Outside of the inner workings of the machine, the chassis also features a 750W PSU and active cooling. There are four USB-A 3.2 ports and 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports, as well as the usual Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 support onboard. Its ultra-portable size certainly makes it convenient to move around if you want to try some old-school LAN partying post-Covid-19 or just show off to your console buddies that you can carry your gaming machine around too.
All that portability and modularity though doesn’t come cheap though, with the base model set to cost $2400 without a discrete GPU and $3200 with an RTX 3080. That’s a lot of organs that need to be sold just to buy one. Not to mention its modular components will likely sell for a premium too. That much money for a PC is far beyond the price tag for the average person. And thanks to the current pre-orders of limited stock that’s all set for the US, it will not be something that we’ll probably see in South Africa any time soon.
Last Updated: December 8, 2020
