Here’s a novel new mini PC which might well tempt Star Trek fans, seeing as it’s an officially licensed computer which is built to look like a Borg cube that goes on sale at the end of the week.
The Borg Cube PC is extremely compact at 6-inches, er, cubed (a little smaller than a ‘real’ Borg starship, of which each side is 3km long). It packs up to an Intel Core i7-7700K quad-core processor (base clock 4.2GHz) on a Mini STX motherboard, with up to 32GB of DDR4 system RAM. It also has room for a pair of SSDs of up to 2TB (the primary one goes in an M.2 slot).
You won’t get a graphics card in here, though: at this size it won’t fit even more compact models. Plus there are no PCIe slots with this motherboard anyway, so you’ll have to make do with integrated graphics (Intel HD Graphics 630).
Still, for the size of this computer, it packs some decent power and storage space, although it doesn’t come cheap.
Your wallet will be assimilated
The base Borg Cube i3 (which is loaded with a Core i3-7100 CPU, 8GB RAM, and a 120GB SSD) will run you to $599 (that’s about AU$790), or around £645 including shipping to the UK.
So yes, it’s pricey, but then Nvidia expects Star Wars fans to buy a graphics card that costs a cool $1,200 (£1,149, AU$1,950). So one way of looking at it is for half this price, Star Trek fans get an entire PC.
Note that this is a limited edition computer manufactured by Cherry Tree in the US, with 320 units remaining on sale at the time of writing. It’s currently on pre-order with shipping to start come Black Friday at the end of the week.
Also note that there is a Borg CubeVR PC which is simply a bigger version (12-inch cube) that you will be able to fit a graphics card in – up to a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, giving you plenty of power for gaming and of course VR, as the name suggests. This PC will be ‘coming very soon’ according to the company, with no pricing details available yet.
As mentioned, these Borg computers are officially licensed Star Trek products.
Source: techradar.com