Digital Trends

HP Blackbird 002

December 4th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

The Mothership

The motherboard is listed as an HP Gaming motherboard on the spec sheet that came with it, and that’s because it’s an Asus Striker Extreme that has been tweaked by HP to run both Crossfire and NVIDIA SLI. It’s one of the most well-known “money is no object” gaming motherboards in existence, with switchable perimeter lighting, on-board controls for CMOS reset, restart and power on/off. It’s also a great overclocker, and uses the fantastic NVIDIA 680i chipset. It also has three PCI-E slots, so you can run SLI and a PCI-E PhysX chip, if you’re into that.

Storage

HP offers a wide array of storage options on the Blackbird, including RAID 1 and RAID 0 arrays. The unit we received had just the necessities: A 160GB Raptor for the boot drive, and a 750GB drive from Seagate for data storage. All in all this is an acceptable package, as the Raptor is blazing fast and 750GB is enough for most people’s “multimedia” collection. However, it should be noted that just dumping all your “data” onto a single cavernous hard drive is a recipe for disaster.

The Blackbird includes five pre-wired drive bays. Just drop a drive in, push it into the slot and it’s connected.

Memory

Voodoo is a long-time proponent of Corsair RAM, so it’s no surprise the Blackbird comes with 2GB of 1066MHz PC2 DDR2 memory. And this is no ordinary memory either, but the 1337 Dominator RAM with built-in heatsinks. Some may gripe about it not having 4GB of RAM but anything over 2GB on a 32-bit OS is a waste of money, period.

Pixel Pumping

As a gaming rig, you’d expect the Blackbird to have a good videocard, and the model we received certainly does. It includes a single NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra. The $800 videocard is the pinnacle of 3D performance these days and is the only card in the system despite it being SLI-ready. The card is air-cooled with a stock cooler, but liquid-cooling is an option.

More Power

Since this rig has just a single videocard, it has but a mere 900w power supply that is SLI capable. That is, the PSU features two six-pin PCI-E adapters, and both of them are used up by the 8800 Ultra. If we won the lottery and wanted to add a second Ultra card to the mix, we’d have to upgrade the PSU.

Audio

Rather than using the industry standard Sound Blaster X-Fi card, HP has opted for the included soundcard that comes with the Striker Extreme motherboard. It’s not “onboard” in the typical sense since it uses an actual ad-in card that fits into a PCI-E X1 slot. It supports 2, 4, 6 and 8 speaker configurations, as well as support for DTS. A Sound Blaster X-Fi card is available as an option however.

The OS

Naturally, the Blackbird ships with Vista Ultimate. What else would you expect from the ultimate gaming machine? Some people might take umbrage to this decision and insist that XP is still the superior gaming system, but a system this powerful should be able to run games in DX10 mode at good frame rates. 

Optical Drives

The Blackbird has two optical drives. One is a slot-fed multi-drive, so you don’t see it when you look at the chassis (it’s behind the white button at the top of the chassis). It can read and write to CDs and DVDs, and supports Lightscribe technology.  Then there’s a second optical drive that can read and write Blu-ray discs, and read HD DVD discs. So, whichever way the format goes, you are covered.
 


Extra Software

We sure hate bloatware, and evidently so does HP as the Blackbird ships with just two pre-installed software packages: AVG anti-virus, which is the same anti-virus package we use on our home computers, and DVD-watching software in case you want to use the HD optical drive. There is no trial software, no bloatware, and nothing aside from Windows pre-installed on the PC.