Why, yes. Double down, even. If not for the intense feelings I had for Intellivision (you never forget your first), I may have ended up a PC gamer instead of strictly a console guy.
(Credit: Digital Press)Let me start with a disclaimer: I'm a console gamer. Always have been, since my friend down the street in Minneapolis got an Atari 2600 in 1979, and I trumped him a year later with Mattel's Intellivision. (Along with George Plimpton, we found Intellivision's Major League Baseball to be clearly superior to Atari's Home Run baseball. Intellivision baseball, hockey, and skiing were pretty much all I cared about in 1980.) Like Larry King with wives, there's long list of consoles that I traded in for newer models over the years: Intellivision to Intellivision 2, to NES, to Sega Genesis, to PlayStation, to Xbox, to Xbox 360. As I moved from console to console, I never did find the need to plunk down for a gaming PC, and thankfully any old PC can run an Intellivision emulator.
If I were a PC gamer (and I happened across a pile of money), however, there are five systems that would definitely be on my list. Since May, we've reviewed one gaming PC each month that has really impressed us. These five desktops are all overclocked, and all but the AVADirect system feature a quad-core processor, so you know your investment--prices of our review units range from $3,600 to nearly $6,600--is well equipped to stand the test of time. Three of the five earned an Editors' Choice, including the HP Blackbird 002, which is only the highest0rated desktop we've ever seen at CNET--at least since Rich Brown and I have been here. (The other two award-winners came from Maingear and Velocity Micro.)
For a specs comparison, videos, and the reviews themselves, I've assembled this page for your viewing pleasure.
HP's and Voodoo PC's Blackbird 002
(Credit: CNET)HP announced the first product of its joint design efforts with Voodoo PC this evening. Our review of the HP Blackbird 002 is up, and it achieved the highest rating we've ever awarded a desktop. We'll let the review speak for itself, but we'll only add here that while we wrote about a custom configuration that won't be available until Oct. 1, you can buy a similar, fixed-configuration system today for $5,500 that looks like this:
- Overclocked Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850
- (2) Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics cards
- Windows Vista Ultimate
- 2GB, 800MHz DDR2 Corsair SDRAM
- 160GB, 10,000rpm hard drive
- 500GB, 7,200rpm hard drive
- (2) 16x dual-layer DVD burners
One external drive bay on the top, another on the bottom right.
(Credit: CNET)HP also announced its new Pavilion Elite line of digital-media-oriented desktops. They look basically the same as the Pavilion Media Center systems from earlier this year, with a few tweaks to the glossy case. We're still working on our review of the higher-end Pavilion Elite m9040n, but we can tell you so far that we're perplexed by the fact that it has bays for two different kinds of removable HP hard drives. This feels like a serious waste of space design-wise, and also like a transparent upselling tactic. The good news is that this system no longer has the superfluous "Media Center" designation in its name, as all PCs with Vista Home Premium or Vista Ultimate include Microsoft's Media Center interface. Stay tuned for that full review tomorrow.
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