Razer has been talking up modular gaming PCs with streamlined swappable parts for years. Now, after various concepts, CES reveals, and standard PC cases with associated branding, the company is actually selling a pre-built desktop PC for the first time.
The Tomahawk is the final version of what we saw at CES 2020 back in January. It’s a simple case design with 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. That Coffee Lake CPU is the kind of part you might find in a high-end gaming laptop, so while it’s fast today it may well be something you’d want to upgrade down the line.
The Tomahawk does have space for a full-size GPU up to 320 x 140mm and there’s an option to order it with an Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition pre-installed. The 210mm x 365mm x 150mm metal chassis is 10L in capacity, comes with a 750W PSU, and uses active cooling. There are 4 USB-A 3.2 ports and 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports, as well as onboard Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 Razer says the small size is designed for bringing to tournaments and LAN parties or just freeing up desk space.
You’ll have to really value those attributes for the Tomahawk to be worth it, because unsurprisingly it does not come cheap. Razer has priced it at $2,400 for the base model without a discrete GPU or $3,200 with a RTX 3080; preorders have opened in the US, but it’s currently listed as out of stock.