Razer unveils Tomahawk, a gaming NUC

For those of us who keep up with PC hardware news, building a new PC isn’t an intimidating experience, but rather an exciting one. Our question on first boot is “how fast it will be,” rather than “will it start on fire. For the rest of the population, it can be an intimidating experience (even if it shouldn’t be). Razer’s newly-unveiled Tomahawk desktop PC looks to provide a solution to that problem through Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC) technology.

So what’s going on inside this stunning-looking piece of technology? This is the Razer Tomahawk, a 10-liters small, fully-upgradable gaming desktop PC. It’s so small—the average mid-tower case is 45 liters, for comparison—because the truth is that it sits somewhere between a desktop and a laptop. There’s no traditional motherboard inside the Tomahawk. Instead, the core of the PC is an Intel NUC. In essence, it turns the core of PC into a swappable PCIe card. The card houses a 45-watt Core i9-9980HK CPU and cooling element, RAM, a Wi-Fi 6 radio, the core ports, and some headers. Razer designed the enclosure for this card along with the space for an off-the-shelf power supply, graphics card, RAM, storage, and fans.

Razer plans to ship this system in June. It’ll have options starting from a Core i7 up to a Core i9, from 16 to 64GB RAM, and a range of Nvidia RTX cards. Pricing starts at just over $2,000 for the starter package.

Keep an eye on this technology

This is a neat idea, but it’s not without its flaws. For one, that price is enough to make any PC builder’s eyes burn, and what you for that price isn’t incredibly powerful. You can build a much more powerful PC from off-the-shelf parts for a much lower price. The CPU, the Core i9-9980HK, is a mobile chip, too. Further, the Intel NUC is at least semi-proprietary, and while Intel says it plans to offer upgrades for a couple of years, it’s tough to get all the way on board. The NUC is hardly universal; NUC is an Intel branding.

On the other hand, this is a step closer to that desktop-grade PC that provides modular options without capacitors, Molex connectors, and CPU pins that Razer talked about back in 2014. The first generation of anything, whether it’s a foldable OLED screen or a NUC-based gaming PC, is typically super expensive. Companies like Cooler Master are planning to offer NUC Element enclosures later this year, too, and as companies figure this stuff out, we’ll likely see prices drop. This could transform into an appealing way to build a PC in the coming years. It’s a hard sell right now, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.