The Razer Tomahawk makes it easier to build a gaming PC

If you’re interested in building your own PC but are put off by the sheer faff of it all, the newly announced Razer Tomahawk could be an appealing prospect.

Razer is an old hat at gaming peripherals and laptops but, aside from a few collaborations with the likes of Lenovo, hasn’t created its own fully-fledged gaming PC until now. Unveiled at CES 2020, the company’s modular Tomahawk looks like it could be something special; aiming to reimagine the task of building a desktop thanks to Intel’s latest NUC PC.

Intel’s NUC (Next Unit of Computing) is, in a nutshell, a compact computer and in one of its latest variants the CPU, RAM and storage are placed on a single PCI-e card instead of mounted on a motherboard which itself has PCI-e slots on it. For someone building a gaming rig, it potentially simplifies the process of slotting together different parts of a machine by bundling together these important aspects of the PC.

It doesn’t give you the flexibility of picking every little part of your gaming desktop but it could get you quicker to the meaty choice of selecting which GPU you want powering your PC’s graphics.

Depending on the NUC you opt for, the Tomahawk is capable of including up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM, up to an Intel Core i9 processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics card. Razer says that RAM, SSD, graphics card and the PC’s fans will be user-upgradable and the NUC itself can also be swapped out further down the line if you choose.

Whether it’s a successful halfway house between a pre-built gaming PC and a fully customisable, design-it-yourself machine remains to be seen, although affordability is a hanging question that could dictate how attractive an alternative it is to the traditional PC-building route. The Razer Tomahawk is expected to be available later this year, but how much it will cost has yet to be announced.