With seemingly everyone announcing Android gaming consoles for your living room these days, I'm not too surprised that gaming peripheral maker Razer got in on the action. Today at CES, Razer detailed that device — the Razer Forge TV.
The Razer Forge TV runs Android TV, has a quad-core Snapdragon 805 processor, an Andreno 420 GPU, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of onboard storage. There are two models that will ship: the Forge TV for $99.99, and then one with a controller for $149.99. Both will be shipping in the first quarter of 2015.
What you have to do is look past the insides and the typical Android console uses, and look forward to what else Razer is going to have it do. Using the Razer Cortex Stream service, the micro-console's best feature will be streaming a game from your PC to the Forge TV. Any game. Any graphics card. For instance, the Nvidia Shield requires GeForce graphics cards for streaming, but Cortex Stream supports Nvidia and AMD. Also, it will stream any of your games, whether it's from Steam, Battle.net, Uplay or Origin. All of this in 1080p streaming and what Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan is calling a lag-free experience.
To go with the Forge TV and its Serval controller, Razer also has another peripheral that will go great with those two devices and the PC to Forge TV streaming. That device is the folding Turret Lapboard.
Coming in at $129.99, the Turret Lapboard is a keyboard and mouse combination that will give you classic (and often required) PC inputs from the comfort of your couch. There is a magnet that keeps the mouse from falling off the tracking surface. The combination of all these newly announced Razer devices could make for the ultimate PC gaming set-up from your couch. The only worry is whether or not wireless devices and streaming will cause too much lag for twitch and precision-based games.
