Digital Trends

HP Blackbird 002

December 4th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We almost threw our back out taking the Blackbird out of its box. It’s a huge PC that is extremely heavy but it looks amazing in person. Pictures from the Internet do not do it justice.

The chassis is enormous and if we had to describe it one word we’d choose the word, “menacing.” That’s because it’s angled “wedge” shape looks cool and sleek, but also kind of threatening since it’s a bit pointy with its wide rear portion narrowing towards the front of the chassis. There’s also a V-shape to the top of the chassis that accentuates the sloping nature of the chassis from the back to the front.

It’s made entirely of cast aluminum and is very thick and sturdy. Even the silver foot that hoists the chassis up off the ground is incredibly sturdy. We sat on the front of the chassis, all 150lbs of us, and it did not flex at all.

The chassis is entirely tool-less. To look at the inside we had to just flip a latch on the front bezel and the door swings open. Then there’s another latch that opens the door covering the PCI add-in cards. There are two more pieces of plastic; one on top of the video card and one at the bottom of the case, that just slide out if you need access. There’s also an allen wrench pushed into some foam at the top of the chassis, but ours fell out in shipping apparently and we were never able to locate it. You can also remove the optical drives by pulling a small lever.

After our initial inspection we plugged everything in only to have a very poor out-of-the-box experience, as they like to call it. We pressed the power button and it began booting, and then went to a screen that told us we might be a victim of counterfeiting. We were then asked to input our Vista product key, so we had to go rummage through the bag that came with it to find our product key. Once we entered it, the system continued booting and eventually we arrived at the Vista desktop. “Alright, so let’s install Crysis,” we thought. Unfortunately, when we clicked on the EXE file on the disc we got an error saying “directory is invalid.” We moved the disc to the other optical drive but got the same error. Confused, we downloaded a random program tried to install it, but got the same error message.

After we booted to Windows for the first time, we were peeved to find we couldn’t install any applications.

After we employed our Google-fu, we discovered that Vista’s idiotic UAC was the culprit. We disabled it, rebooted, and were able to actually install a program on the computer. Why was this computer set up this way? We have no idea. One would think that it would be setup so that one could install programs on a $5K computer, but apparently that’s not the case. And it was not a fluke either, as after we restored the PC from the recovery partition at the end of testing it was exactly the same way.

So once we had moved beyond that hurdle, we were able to actually use the system and holy cow, was it fast. The combination of such powerful hardware and a clean installation of Vista made it run faster than we’ve ever seen it run before. We ran the Windows Experience Index and the Blackbird received the highest score possible (5.9) in every category except RAM, where it received a score of 5.2. This gave the machine an overall score of 5.2.

For some reason Vista awarded the Blackbird’s RAM a score of 5.2, with everything else getting the highest possible score.

Once we had installed Crysis we reveled in cranking up the game’s graphics as high as they could go. We found we were able to play at 1280x1024 with everything set to Very High, and it was amazing. On a widescreen display, we were able to play at 1600x1200 with everything set to High. Our own system has a Core 2 Duo @ 3.0GHz and an 8800 GT and suffice to say the Blackbird ran Crysis much better, obviously. We also ran 3DMark06 on the Blackbird, and it returned a scintillating score of 13,098.

Even more impressive than the performance, for a cooling geek, was how well the CPU water-cooler functions. The last time we reviewed a system with a quad-core CPU, it was air-cooled and ran extremely hot idling at 70C and running at 92C under load. And that was at stock speeds. The Blackbird’s processor is overclocked to 3.3GHz and yet we found it idled at around 40C and never went above 57C under load. That is amazing performance, and goes to show the amount of headroom available in the kit for including the GPU in the cooling loop.

The Blackbird’s water-cooler does an amazing job of keeping the overclocked quad-core CPU chilly at all times.

For non-gaming tasks, using the Blackbird is like using a Ferrari to go grocery shopping. It’s amazingly fast and responsive, and also very quiet as well. The interior fans are audible but not what we would call “loud” by any means.

HP has also included a recovery partition on the Raptor drive, so we took it for a test drive and it was an okay experience. When you boot you’re given the option of booting into Vista or the recovery partition. You would think it’d be a one-click affair but instead it’s just like installing Windows. You’re asked what partition to install the OS to and from there it does its thing. Once it finished installing, which took about a half-hour, we had to re-activate Windows.