Project Christine is a strange, sexy machine that promises to eliminate the complexities of PC gaming.
The PC’s greatest strength – virtually limitless design flexibility – is also its biggest weakness. Sure, you can tweak everything from RAM speed to airflow on the way to building your own personal HAL, but you need some idea of what you’re doing in order to make the magic happen. Quick – what type of CPU socket is on your motherboard? Some of you know, some of you will go look and a lot of you will immediately think, “What?”
This is where Razer’s Project Christine comes in. It’s a fully-modular PC design in which individual components like CPU, GPU, RAM and storage are self-contained and can be swapped in or out as needed. Each module is sealed and liquid cooled, the PCI Express architecture allows everything to work together without any horsing around and it supports multiple operating systems that may be selected at boot.
“Project Christine is a new concept design that will revolutionize the way users view the traditional PC,” Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan said. “This is the first gaming system that is able to keep pace with technology and could allow consumers to never buy another PC, or gaming system, again.”
It’s a weird looking thing but sexy too, with a touch-screen LCD display that probably has some practical function but scores most of its points just for being so damned Star Trek-ish. The obvious downside is the price: Christine is only a concept at this point but proprietary components like these will unavoidably cost more – probably a lot more – than conventional hardware. Of course, Razer has never shied away from inflicting sticker shock on its customers, and if it can actually make this work, Christine may end up closer to the Steam Machine we expected from Valve than anything that actually bears the name.
Source: Razer
Published: Jan 7, 2014 11:50 pm