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It's almost been a year since we reviewed the HP Blackbird 002 gaming PC, featured on our 2007 Holiday Gift Guide. In June of this year, HP revved up it's engines and released the new Blackbird 002 Exhilaration Edition, featuring the latest NVIDIA GTX 280 graphics. How does it perform compared to the previous model? Read on to find out.

First, let's start with the specs of this beast:

• NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 at 3.2GHz
• 2x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 in SLI
• 4GB Corsair Dominator DDR3-1600 RAM
• Super Multi Blu-Ray Disc and HD DVD-ROM Drive
• Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

The Blackbird 002 EE looks no different on the outside, but on the inside, it's got the latest and greatest components available on the market. We were blown away by the performance numbers of the original Blackbird 002, and the Exhilaration Edition takes it to the next level, by only a small margin however.

In our PCMark Vantage tests, the Exhilaration Edition pushed out a score of 5617 PCMarks, compared to the original Blackbird's score of 5389. Not a huge improvement. In our CINEBENCH tests, the EE performed somewhat slower than the original:

What irks me a little is that the Exhilaration Edition's processor wasn't overclocked like many other gaming machines on the market and in my research, only uses two SLI cards instead of a triple SLI configuration. Since the CPU is water cooled, I'm pretty sure that HP could have pushed the system even further.

It's certainly a speedy system, and will play all of today's latest games, but priced out at over $6500 bucks, it doesn't give the exhilaration that it should for that kind of price.

Pros

• Crysis-capable.
• Latest and greatest components.
• Easy to upgrade.

Cons

• Not the performance boost we were hoping for.

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