ZAK STOREY, EDITOR
BUILD IT
Case Transplants
It’s time to transfer our build from the Hydra Mini to Razer’s new Tomahawk
LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: FRUSTRATING
LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 HOURS
THE CONCEPT
IF YOU HAVEN’T read our review of the Tomahawk ITX chassis just yet, you’re in for one hell of a treat. This thing is a seriously slick box. For its first consumer case (or one of two, I should say), Razer has really managed to hit the nail on the head. The design elements are there, the lighting is sophisticated and sleek, and the quality-of-life stuff is included For an ITX case (which have always been a notorious pain in the butt to deal with) it’s pretty damn good.
It’s not flawless—there’s some minor missteps here and there that addressing in iteration 2.0—but they’re just small frustrations rather than larger oversights, and things that you can work around easily enough. Needless to say, if you like Razer’s products, and you’re after an ITX chassis, you’re going to love this.
So, the concept for this build, what is it? Well, this is actually going to be a transplant build. There’s no better way of testing and reviewing a chassis than living with it day to day. To give you a little insight into how we do things here at Maximum PC, we have two rigs that we use on a daily basis “in the office” (read: “home working”). One is a Windows machine, where we do the majority of our testing, gaming, benchmarking, and writing. The other is a company-issued MacBook, where we manage our content on the internal servers, and use our bespoke pagination need software to make sure everyone on the team knows what state each page of the mag is in. That being the case, typically we have a Windows machine at work, one at home (a personal machine), and then the corporate MacBook that we can transport between the two locations.
Now that we’re remote working on a semi-permanent basis, the home and work machine have blended together, and as such in my case, I have one Windows machine—that sweet, sweet Hydra build from a few issues back—and my MacBook. Transplanting that Hydra build into this case is nothing if not a risk: If something goes wrong during the transplant, I’ve got to work my butt off, out of hours, to get the thing back running again, otherwise I’m left without a rig for either personal or office use.
SO ANY PART SWAPS THEN?
SADLY, this time around, no. This is going to be a little bit of an underwhelming build in terms of performance figures, as technically we’ve pretty much already seen them. On the whole, not a lot is changing between this and the Hydra build I did a few issues back. Since I first got the Hydra rig home, and ended up using it as my work and gaming machine, I have made one slight change to it, and that’s swapping out the paltry 16GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4, for a 64GB kit of HyperX Predator DDR4 instead, which you might recognize from our tiny but powerful ITX PC inside the NZXT H1. The reason for this is that I really wanted to see if Star Citizen performed better with more memory. It sort of does.