Article written by Rob Wright and Shelton Romhanyi.

The fruit of Hewlett-Packard and VoodooPC's labor has arrived, and it is indeed delicious. Tom's Games goes inside HP's new gaming rig, the Blackbird 002, to see how "Voodoo DNA" has gotten HP into the high-end gaming arena.

http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2008/0 [...] rd_review/

For that amount of cash, you'd think they'd throw in a sound card! [/not an on-board fan]

The article states the CPU is a QX6680, as I've never heard about that model before I checked at Intel but nothing showing up. Can anyone cast some light on this?

dido on the soundcard. what about expasion slots! am I blind or there are none left???

Could be an OEM chip sold directly to HP?

lol. I thought you said "dildo". As for expansion slots, I guess they've been consumed by the water-cooled crossfire 2900XT's.

ARG Matey! Oh wait that's Blackbeard sorry...

One thing not spoken too is availability. The dell may be overclocked much higher but can you actually get one now at that level? The lower over-clock of the blackbird may just reflect a more honest approach to marketing what is actually available? There have been headlines about Dell shipping delays and outriht withdrawl of availability.

. . . but maybe I'm just in love with the case and design of the Blackbird 002.

I like the HDD bays.

Argh, it' a frakkin' typo. Sorry guys, my bad. It's a QX6850, and the article has been fixed.

Ah, that makes more sense!

Pretty cool PC but the special features really seem to be the case and the cooling. The Striker board cooling is standard but the ability to run ATI cards is special. The real problem with this system is that it is very limited in configuration. Going to the website for the blackbird to order one only allows you got a 9650 yorkfield if you buy a special configured unit. If you pick this one for 5500 then you can only get a pair of ATI2900, not even the fastest ATI cards, neither the 3850 or 3870 are available. So pick the more expensive LCi model, it is stuck with the same limit of the QX6850 and video card selection is also very limited to either 2900's or 8800GTX or Ultra's, and it comes in at 6500, for these prices you should be able to get a totally customized experiance with exactly what you want. If you go with the air cooled system then you can pick the 8800GT but still not the ATI 3870 hardware. Of course then you miss out on one of the coolest features which is the water cooling system. It would be nice to notice the big limitations of this PC with a Luxury look and price

Yeah, I'd be inclined to buy the case if they sold it seperately (if I was in the market for one).

Well...at least its pretty? :|

Too bad about the performance...
I am still curious as to choosing the 2900xt CF...doesnt make sense from a gamers stand point, let alone marketing (actually it *only* makes sense when dealing with cost..its cheaper to use than gtx's or ultras..)

Anyways gorgeous layout (dell could learn a bit from that)

Performance however...not what one would hope for that kind of money..

Yes, the layout was damn sexy. In fact, it's probably the best I've ever seen. And truth be told, I was expecting the performance test numbers to be a little bit lower than they were compared to the Dell. After all, the Blackbird had a lower clock speed and a CrossFire scheme going up against the XPS with SLI. So I was pretty impressed with the numbers overall.

As for the ATI-SLI motherboard scheme, sure, I'm guessing most gamers would have preferred to see better cards in the Blackbird or SLI. But it was pretty damn cool to see that CrossFire motherboard combination -- and have it work with no issues whatsoever.

off the shelf parts at double the cost plus a nicelookin'n'heavy case. not a good deal in my view.

In response to a few folks that posted.

There are available slots, even with LC dual video cards. Most of the higher end versions start out with a Creative Audio Sound Blaster(R) X-Fi(TM) XtremeGamer, and even offer the Ageia Physix card. You can go ATI or NVIDIA like the Dual NVIDIA GeForce 8800 ULTRA, with 768MB of GDDR3 SDRAM (LC).

It would have been interesting to see how a more similar machine to the Dell one would have done in benchmarks.

I'd take HP's consistency of quality, and willingness to service all of the products they make over Dell's, we only support the way it was configured. Ever try and upgrade the OS on a Dell and find yourself hunting for hours only to find out the OEM sound card only has the one original driver that came from Dell that doesn't match your OS. Sadly neither companies offer good phone support, though being a gaming rig this may offer a different line of support.

This is one PC I would seriously consider buying over building my own.

Wait, so with the hard drives, does that mean you just put a hard drive in the slot, and the power and data transfer cables are already in the back? And you just have to slide it in? Because that's awesome!

I hope that's what they meant....

I priced out a Blackbird and a XPS 720 HTC. The only advantage the Blackbird seems to have is it offers cooling for the CPU and the GPUs. The XPS comes with a good 3 year warranty as the Blackbird comes with a 1 year limited. The XPS was about $75 less. I don't really need a warranty as I typically build my own rigs, but if I were to spend that kind of cash on a PC I would want a better return than just 1 year of limited coverage. I like the way both systems look so it's isn't an ascetics thing to me. However, if they ad kept the original case that they had planned to use for the Blackbird with the automatic vents and stuff, then I think it would win hands down. But as I see it now, XPS performs better, is "technically" cheaper, and has a better warranty (investment). Also Dell was the only one to offer an XP option.

That's exactly how it works, yes. It's pretty damn slick.