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Digital Life 2007: HP Blackbird 002

By Alex Petraglia on Monday, October 1, 2007 at 8:00 AM EST  

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Since acquiring Voodoo in 2006, Hewlett-Packard has been infusing its own brand of high-end gaming PCs with the heart and soul of the legendary enthusiast-computer maker. Its latest, the Blackbird 002, features everything the PC gaming junkie could ever dream of: the highest-end consumer hardware on the planet, water-cooled and housed inside a visually captivating chassis that will sport customizable laser-etched side panels in due time.

There were about ten Blackbirds at HP’s booth: $50,000 worth of silicon and metal and plastic sitting boldly in two rows and serving up BioShock at a stunning 2560×1600 resolution on HP’s own LP3065 (a gorgeous 30” flat-screen, not included with system by default) with nary a hiccup, even during the most intensive battles. Rapture never looked quite so good.

HP had plenty of friendly employees on-hand to answer my burning questions…and one not-so-friendly one who yelled at me when I tried to tweak the video settings in BioShock. I noticed everything was maxed-out, save the option for DirectX 10 Detail Surfaces, which was disabled, interestingly enough.

Without being able to benchmark or conduct a more thorough analysis at the show, it’s difficult to judge exactly how the system handles a wide variety of games under a diversity of conditions. If the hardware, which includes an Intel Core Extreme QX6850, 2GB Corsair DDR2-800, dual nVidia GeForce 8800 Ultras, and over 600GB of SATA hard drive space, is any indication, then you won’t be needing to upgrade this system for a very, very long time.

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