It’s been a weird year in a lot of ways, some very serious, others less so. The KFConsole, a small form factor gaming PC with a built-in chicken-warmer, is perhaps the ideal cherry on top. No, it’s not April.
Meet the KFConsole
The specs of the KFConsole are no joke. An Intel NUC 9 Extreme Compute Element with a Core i9-9980HK processor provides plenty of grunt with 8 cores and 5GHz max boost. Meanwhile, the KFConsole handles graphics with an unnamed ASUS card – though an image on the CM site looks like a DUAL GeForce RTX 3060Ti MINI 8GB. Apparently there’s even a “first of its kind hot swappable GPU slot” for futureproofing. We’re pretty sure most desktop PCs have something similar, and regardless of the name, this appears to have thoroughbred PC lineage.
Update: the presence of a DVI port actually suggests the GPU is the older ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 2070 MINI. We assumed the team behind the KFConsole would want to use current generation components, but it seems even PR stunts are affected by the GPU shortage. It’s a good thing the GPU can be swapped.
Most important, however, is a drawer for the explicit purpose of warming your chicken tenders. Using the heat from the Intel Core i9 and the Nvidia RTX 2070, what looks like a glass tray is heated. Apparently Cooler Master have patented this, which will surely disappoint all the other case manufacturers that would have otherwise rushed to join the case-with-built-in-tendie-warmer market.
Availability and Pricing
Normally when we talk about a product being shown off, we like to talk about how and where you can get it. The KFConsole, however, was created by a team of modders led by Timpelay. It’s unclear whether there are any plans to bring such a device to market.
If Cooler Master were to go to market, the KFConsole probably wouldn’t be cheap. Intel list the i9-9980HK NUC 9 Extreme Compute Element at over £1000, and the RTX 2070 used costs over £500 according to the Nvidia website, though a £400ish RTX 3060Ti would make more sense to include. Plus, specced 2x1TB Seagate Barracuda SSDs would add £250-300. That’s before we consider the power supply, memory, or custom case. A realistic cost is over £2000. As well as smelling of 11 herbs and spices, this smells of PR stunt.
