HP purchased Voodoo, a popular gaming PC manufacturer in 2006. Since that time they have worked together on a PC called the Blackbird 002 (001 was a prototype). The Blackbird 002 isn’t for the casual gamer, but would make the best gift for the hardcore gamer this holiday season.

The Blackbird 002 isn’t just any old PC stuffed into a nice case; it was built from the ground up with the gamer in mind. The 002 literally floats above the ground with the sleek aluminum stand which supports a whopping 600 pounds. Inside is a whole different story. The 002 comes either air-cooled or with a water-cooled GPU, CPU, or both. Our model, the Blackbird 002 LCi came with both components water-cooled which was extremely quiet.

The components inside of the 002 PC aren’t proprietary either, they’re industry standard from the ASUS Striker Extreme 680i motherboard to the graphics cards. HP offers both a Intel and AMD version. The Blackbird 002 also supports not only dual ATI graphics cards in CrossFire, but also supports dual NVIDIA graphics cards in SLI mode.

HP also made it easy to change or install hard drives by making it completely tool-less. Just take out one of the bays, pop the drive in, and you’re good to go. The rest of the case is also easy to take apart, including removal of doors and expansion slots. The cables are also fairly organized and aren’t crammed in one spot reducing airflow.

The specs of our model included:
- Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core 3.0GHz Processor
- Dual ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT Graphics Cards
- 4 GB 1066MHz CORSAIR PC2-8500 DDR2 SDRAM
- 1.1 kilowatt power supply
- Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

After just a few hours of using the PC, it was a speed demon compared to my own Core 2 Duo PC and ran Call of Duty 4 and Unreal Tournament 3 at high settings with no problem. In our benchmarking tests, the Blackbird 002 scored the highest out of any of the systems we’ve tested thus far in PCMark Vantage with 5389 PCMarks. In CINEBENCH, the PC received a score of 3410 using a single core, and a huge 11693 using all four cores. Unlike most HP systems, we didn’t find a speck of bloatware on our review unit, and that’s exactly how we like it.

Treat your gamer right this holiday season with the HP Blackbird 002 PC, which starts at $2700 USD. There is a New Year’s Special however, which will get you one of these bad boys for $2399 with a liquid-cooled Core 2 Duo CPU, 2GB of PC2-6400 CORSAIR DDR2 RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of graphics memory.

Pros

• Extreme gaming performance.
• Uniquely designed case.
• Non-proprietary components.
• Large power supply for expansion.
• Easy to change and install hard drives.

Cons

• Heavy.

Final Verdict
5 out of 5 stars.

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