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

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.

They’re also made of aluminum and feature Razer’s Chroma RGB lighting underneath, so we’re definitely in semi-premium case territory, and they’ve also got creature comforts like dedicated drive bays and mounting spots for 2.5mm 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.

Image: Razer

Each case comes 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 at the very top.

At 356 x 202 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.

Image: Razer

Razer says the Mini-ITX chassis will be available today at Razer.com and “select retailers,” with the ATX version 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 this fall.