HP gets in the game with Blackbird

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"HP almost had a heart attack when the design team came up with this," said Rahul Sood, Voodoo co-founder and CTO of HP Gaming.

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See a review of the HP Blackbird 002 at CNET.com

Blackbird has been in the works between both the HP and Voodoo teams for about a year. The result is the HP logo on the outside, and what the company is calling "Voodoo DNA" on the inside. The effect is a gaming PC that's not quite as high-end as Voodoo models on the market, but above the capability and feel of a consumer or business HP desktop.

The resulting product shows that the integration of Voodoo into HP's newly formed Gaming division is going well, Enderle said. "It's the wish list of Voodoo tied to the technology of HP."

Voodoo actually had input on the original version of Blackbird ("Blackbird 001") before it was official that HP would acquire Voodoo, said Phil McKinney, vice president of HP Gaming. HP was already in talks with Voodoo and decided to have the smaller company weigh in on HP's idea for a gaming PC. HP killed the product after hearing Voodoo's input.

"It wasn't enough," Sood said in a recent interview. "We wanted a product that would completely bring innovation back to the desktop."

So the two companies got together the first week after the merger was official, and version 002 was born.

And it's not just for gamers. HP hopes to attract other creative types with Blackbird's capabilities. McKinney says only a quarter of Voodoo's customers play video games with their PCs. The vast majority are actually using them for video, photo and music editing, he said.

High-end features like localized heat chambers and liquid cooling are great if you can afford them--but it seems that HP's intention here is not to keep those features walled off from mainstream consumers. The company plans to eventually have some of Blackbird's technology trickle down into mainstream PCs, according to McKinney.

Perhaps the design will eventually, too. As Sood noted, the desktop PC market "has lacked innovation for years. There's only so many times you can paint a system before thinking, 'What am I doing here?'"

[Michael.Hatamoto]

Should be interesting

Glad to see that Rahul Sood has been doing some productive things
lately! The entire Voodo (well, now HP) staff has been relatively
quiet, so let's just hope that it turns out to be a great product.

I always wondered who bought these luxury PCs and notebooks,
but if companies continue to make them, someone out there is
purchasing the products, right?

[Que.Ball]

Ground level dust

Another benefit to that design should be to cut down on dust collected inside the case. I find that a PC on the ground will collect dust more quickly that one elevated even a few inches.

At work we have a bunch of Apple pro desktops for the graphic arts department. We got these brackets to hang them from under the desk instead of leaving them on the ground and they stay much cleaner as a result.

[adlyb1]

Nice Design...

...but way too pricey for what you get.

DIY with the same basic components is less than $3500, just don't think a fancy case (a very fancy case), some system tweaks and a one year service and support contract are worth $2000 more.

Pros
Supports SLI and Crossfire
Uses off the shelf components (This is a huge)
Best case design I've seen

Cons
Price, Price, Price
One year service and support contract
No dedicated Soundcard
Only comes with 2GB of RAM

[daftkey]

Let's see you do it yourself, then.

Luckily manufacturers and purchasers of high-end PCs alike couldn't give a lick about the DIY crowd. Do it yourselfers are notoriously cheap and incredibly unprofitable (like you've already demonstrated) and don't see any value in actually getting the most performance out of the SLI Video cards and 15000RPM RAID arrays possible by having a "very fancy case and system tweaks".

Aside from this, polished aluminum with separate heat zones that can still house generic parts - this isn't a small feat and I'd bet if you hired a fabricator to do this for your DIY machine you wouldn't be paying much less than 2 G's. There's a reason why HP is now only the second PC manufacturer that has actually managed to build a case with properly separated heat zones (and you're paying out the nose for those of the "other" manufacturer, as well). I'm sure in mass production they are substantially cheaper to produce, but you don't expect a PC like this to be priced based on cost anyhow, do you?

[voss749]

Thats nice...

Hp,

Now try spending an extra $10 on your $600-$700 pc's and put in a 400 watt power supply instead of those cheapy 250 watt supplies they put on Pavillions so we can all install decent graphics cards.

[akhill10]

Very expensive

Like all the other top names, this is ridiculously expensive. The three harddrives are unnecessary, and for a top of the line PC, they should use 4gb of ram, instead of 2gb.

[M A]

4gbs?

This machine comes w/ Vista 32-bit. AFAIK 32-bit OSes don't even support a full 4gb of RAM in a machine. Why spend a couple of hundred dollars for something you can't even use?

OTOH, if this was the 64-bit version of Vista, then I might agree with you.

[Galaxy5]

A lot nicer looking than an XPS

Sorry, but those garish XPS things are goofy looking - straight
outta the 80s.

[drfrost]

If people had any clue how easy it is...

If people had any clue how easy it is to put together your own computer from high quality components (tomshardware.com has several "How To" articles), these high-margin excessively priced gaming computers would be a thing of the past...

[daftkey]

How easy is it?

Here's an "easy" exercise that you can enlighten us "clueless" ones with - give us a list of what you would use, the cost (same components, including warranty and service) and the same case design (this is half the battle - there is more than just aesthetics to this case) and show us what premium we're paying to have HP do it for us.

Yes, I could easily do this myself. No, I would never do it. Why? I have a life and am paid enough for an hour of my time that any cost premium would be absorbed by keeping that time for more productive use.

[rupakg]

HP announces Blackbird 002 - the "beauty and the beast" in one

I referenced your article and review on my blog post at http://developershelf.blogspot.com/2007/09/hp-announces-blackbird-002-beauty-and.html

[ciparis]

I think this exceeds Voodoo's offerings.

They don't offer a case anything like this. Among case designs
and build quality levels from major manufacturers, Apple's Mac
Pro is the only comparison that comes to mind -- aesthetically-
minded shoppers will finally have a welcome new choice in a
really solidly-built machine. Enderle's commentary seemed
rather acrobatic in missing that comparison.

This is good news. I hope the industry rewards them for it with
strong sales.