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After two whiffs, Razer’s latest Tomahawk PC cases look practical enough to actually exist

After two whiffs, Razer’s latest Tomahawk PC cases look practical enough to actually exist

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What happened to the Tomahawk Elite and the Tomahawk NUC?

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Last January, we showed you Razer’s awesome-looking Tomahawk Elite desktop PC case, with its gull-wing doors and auto-lifting lid for excessive heat.

This January, I told you about the stunning Razer Tomahawk prebuilt desktop, with slide-out upgradable Intel NUC Element modules and space for the latest GPUs despite its tiny 10-liter frame.

As far as we can tell, no product called the “Razer Tomahawk” has actually ever shipped. But that isn’t keeping Razer from trying again today with a pair of practical-looking PC cases for rolling your own system.

Image: Razer

The new $199 Razer Tomahawk A1 (ATX) and $179 Tomahawk M1 (Mini-ITX) are fairly standard if quite flexible cases with a few features that set them apart — primarily, a pair of tempered glass panels with rear hinges so they can swivel backwards like suicide doors, and can also be lifted right off.

Image: Razer

The cases feature Razer’s Chroma RGB lighting underneath, and they’ve also got creature comforts like dedicated drive bays and mounting spots for 2.5-inch SSDs, lots of cable management, and — in the case of the ATX version — space for a 360mm radiator up front and up to a 240mm radiator up top.

Each case comes also with a USB-C port up top with 3.2 Gen 2 speeds, dedicated mic and 3.5mm combo jacks and two USB-A ports, and a magnetic dust filter.

Razer has also confirmed to us that the new cases are made of steel — not aluminum like the company’s marketing materials originally said. Here’s the correct spec sheet:

At 367.2 x 206 x 321.5mm, the Tomahawk Mini-ITX won’t win any awards for being particularly small — despite only supporting Mini-ITX/DTX motherboards and SFX/SFX-L power supplies — but it should fit most Nvidia RTX 3080 cards on the market with its 320mm of graphics card room.

The Tomahawk Mini-ITX.
The Tomahawk Mini-ITX.
Image: Razer

Razer’s Mini-ITX chassis is available for preorder today at Razer.com, shipping in November, with the ATX version coming sometime this fall. I wouldn’t expect to ever hear about the Tomahawk Elite or Tomahawk NUC again: as of yesterday, the NUC was just listed as a “concept” on Razer’s website, and nearly two years later, the Elite was still a “notify me” product.

Razer says it's also working with motherboard manufacturers to integrate Chroma RGB lighting, with the first AMD boards from ASRock coming in Q4.

Correction October 12th, 1:16 AM ET: Razer’s briefing materials said the cases were made of aluminum, but the company says they’re actually made of steel. We’ve also updated the dimensions of the Mini-ITX case based on the company’s revised spec sheet — it’s slightly larger than originally mentioned.