Williams Pelegrin
Apart from selling a slew of PC gaming accessories, Razer’s best known for stuffing a bunch of gaming power into its laptops. However, you can’t just open them up and upgrade the parts. On the other hand, gaming towers allow for much more customization and can take up a tremendous amount of space. Hoping for some sort of middle-ground, Razer today unveiled the Tomahawk.
At first blush, the Tomahawk is very reminiscent of the Razer Core line of external GPUs. Both boxes are made out of aluminum and don’t take up too much space on a desk, though the Tomahawk has a larger tempered glass window on the sides. However, the Tomahawk isn’t an external GPU—it’s a gaming desktop based on Intel’s latest NUC 9 Extreme Compute Element.
Think of the NUC 9 Extreme Computer Element as a brain with swappable parts. It contains up to the Intel Core i9-9980HK processor, slots for memory and storage, cooling, Wi-Fi 6, and enough ports to make hardcore gamers happy. We’re talking two Ethernet ports, six USB ports, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and more. For graphics, you can stuff one of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 20-series card in this thing.
That’s the beauty of the Tomahawk: the NUC Element board makes it simpler to swap parts in and out than on a normal gaming PC. There’s also some wiggle room in how you want to approach the Tomahawk. You can just buy the Tomahawk case from Razer and pick up a NUC Element board elsewhere—Intel will sell additional boards separately through Newegg, Amazon, and other retailers. You can buy the Tomahawk with the NUC 9 Extreme Computer Element and swap out some parts. You can even keep things simple by buying the Tomahawk turnkey and not doing a thing to it.
Speaking of turnkey, Razer will offer the Tomahawk with pre-selected specs starting in June for $2,300. The turnkey system features the Intel Core i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and an RTX 20-series GPU. The Tomahawk tops out with the aforementioned Core i9 processor, 64 GB of RAM, and the GeForce RTX 2080 Super. We don’t yet have pricing for only the case or other configurations.
