Gaming hardware maker Razer has been dabbling with the idea of a modular desktop computer since at least 2014, when the company showed off its Project Christine concept at that year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Six years later, during CES 2020, the company finally announced it was actually going to sell a modular PC called the Razer Tomahawk Gaming Desktop.
Razer has officially revealed pricing
details, and you can sign up to be notified when the computer is in stock. But
it’s not available for purchase at the moment. And when it is, it won’t be
cheap. It also won’t be quite a modular as the Project Christine concept. Prices
start at US$ 2400 for model with an Intel
Core i9-9980HK 45-watt, 8-core Intel Coffee Lake processor, 16GB of DDR4-2667
memory, a 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD and a 2TB 5400 RPM hard drive.
But if you want discrete graphics, the
price jumps to US$ 3200 for a model that also has an NVIDIA RTX 3080 Founders
Edition GPU. The good news is that you can also bring your own graphics card if
you want to us something different. That’s because, unlike most small
form-factor desktop computers, the Razer Tomahawk Gaming Desktop is designed to
support full-sized graphics cards.
The system is based on Intel’s Ghost
Canyon NUC platform, and it’s basically a case, backplane, and two PCIe slots:
one for a graphics card and another for an Intel Compute Element, which is
basically an entire computer on a module. So if you want to use a different
GPU, you can just supply your own graphics card. If you want to upgrade to a
more powerful graphics card in the future, you can do that too. And
theoretically you could do the same with the CPU by swapping out the Intel Compute
Element that comes with the Tomahawk for a more powerful version… assuming
Intel eventually releases one.
That’s not necessarily certain to happen.
The Compute Element is a new product from the Intel NUC team, and the company
doesn’t have the best track record of continuing to support new form factors
indefinitely. The Intel Compute Stick had a short lifespan, and the Compute
Card was even shorter-lived. So investing in a Razer Tomahawk today may or may
not be a wise investment in the future. You’ll almost certainly be able to
upgrade the GPU eventually without connecting an external graphics dock. The
CPU? You might be able to upgrade that too.
If you’re looking for a more versatile
gaming PC you might still be better off going with a more traditional tower.
But the Razer Tomahawk is smaller than a typical desktop, which means it’ll
take up less space on your desk. And it still packs a lot of horsepower. Other
features include two Thunderbolt 3 ports, four USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, mic
and headphone jacks, a 750W power supply, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, an unpopulated
M.2 slot, and dual 120mm fans.
