Blackbird 002 takes flight

HP today announced the availability of its newest gaming PC, the HP Blackbird 002. The system is the first product to come out of HP's gaming group since last year's VoodooPC acquisition.

One look at the Blackbird is all that's necessary to know what happens when a boutique gaming PC manufacturer is given access to the resources of a multibillion dollar corporation. The system features a full aluminum chassis with separate heat compartments for all the major components, and a cast-aluminum foot that hoists the entire system in the air to open up a sixth face on the case just for cooling.

HP has worked on the Blackbird project for a year and a half, several months prior to the VoodooPC acquisition. According to Phil McKinney, vice president and chief technical officer of HP, the gaming business unit originally formed in March of 2006 and began working on the Blackbird 001. However, the 001 didn't last very long. McKinney explains, "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."

Rahul Sood, VoodooPC cofounder and CTO of the HP gaming business unit, explained that the 001 died around the time of the VoodooPC acquisition. "They approached us with it conceptually and we gave our feedback, and then 002 started at just about that time."

The Blackbird 002 has a Voodoo DNA logo prominently displayed inside the case, a physical reminder of why HP brought in Sood and the VoodooPC team. According to McKinney, "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."

While many prebuilt systems scream "keep out" with cluttered internals and proprietary hardware, the Blackbird features removable side panels, abundant LED lighting inside and outside the case, and support for standard PC components. Sood pointed out that the final system will have a switch that can turn off all the LED lights for owners that keep their systems in the bedroom. Lower-cost models will ship with air cooling, but the high-end configurations will have self-contained cooling units.

The systems on display at a recent San Francisco media event had a built-in toolkit, but they might never get used because the system has specially designed latches and trays for quick component upgrades. Hard drives, for example, sit in trays that slide directly into the motherboard.

Sood readily admits that there's a lot of HP innovation in the Blackbird. The 002 isn't just an HP-branded VoodooPC box. "HP brought a whole new level of insanity to our engineering process," he said, through intense system-shock and vibe-stress tests that prompted several design changes, such as the addition of video-card extenders. The gaming group also tapped HP engineers to help work on the system thermals, and the hard-drive technology came from the HP workstation group.

The Blackbird will eventually support both AMD and Intel CPU options, but will launch with Intel first because HP is waiting on AMD's next-gen Phenom chip. Consumers will also have a choice of Nvidia or ATI video cards.

HP is offering a limited-edition Blackbird 002 system with special side panels and a custom configuration for the month-long launch window starting in September, and expects to have the full system-configuration options available on October 1. Systems will start at $2,500 for the air-cooled version and will top out above $7,000 with liquid cooling and all the upgrades.