I want one! HP reveals the Blackbird 002

Mike Bantick
Friday, 07 September 2007 05:37

Your IT - Entertainment

Most hard-core PC gamers are pretty tech savvy, they could piece together a powerful rig.  But if you want the best gaming beast off the shelf and you have the bucks to throw at it, check out the Blackbird 002 LCi from HP.

It sits on a cast-aluminium foot, enabling cooling air-flow below the slick black case of HP’s latest offering from the recently acquired VoodooPC Inc.

Designed for gamers the machines will be available in preset varieties from September 15th.  The Calgary Alberta facility of HP will then produce user requested hand built configurations from October 1st.

Vice president and chief technical officer of HP Phil McKinney explains the reasoning behind HP’s leap into custom gaming rigs; "HP is great with engineering, but we came to realize that to go in and make a statement in the market, we needed to step up the whole process. We actually took the very unorthodox approach inside HP to kill that product even though it was well underway and basically do a complete restart."

"We recognized that we had the engineering expertise, but we were missing the gaming DNA. As much as we have people inside HP that all play games, it's different from having the gaming DNA." Said McKinney

After a failed project with Blackbird 001, HP appropriated the VoodooPC brand.  Rahul Sood, VoodooPC cofounder and CTO of the new HP gaming business feels the timing could not have been better; "They approached us with it conceptually and we gave our feedback, and then 002 started at just about that time."

Whilst full specifications for the full range of Blackbird 002 seem hard to come by, the initial Intel based specs can be found on page two, the other important detail is price, and they are hefty, starting at US$2,500 for the air-cooled model, and moving on up to a liquid-cool US$7,500 smackers.