HP Blackbird 002 LC Gaming System Review

The Voodoo and HP Merger

The combination of HP and Voodoo PC has its first fruits in the form of the very sexy Blackbird 002 gaming PC. With what might be the best designed case we have seen and some industry-standard hardware that is upgradeable, the Blackbird might be the best boutique PC yet.

HP gets some Voodoo

It was WAY BACK in September of 2006 that we first heard news of the renowned boutique PC builder Voodoo PC being bought up by the likes of PC giant HP.  At the time it seemed more like a reactionary response to Dell’s purchase of Alienware, but according to this editor, HP has done a much better job of working with Voodoo than Dell has with Alienware.  While Alienware as “left alone” to continue work as-is, Voodoo and HP decided to really take the relationship a step further.

While the pre-existing Voodoo products remain on their site and support for them continues, only one new product has been released since the two companies merged: the Blackbird 002.  This a completely new design from the chassis on in and Voodoo dove deep into the HP R&D labs to put together this system. 

Custom Build Specifications and Pricing

The system build that HP sent over is a pretty standard high-end gaming PC with an overclocked Intel Core 2 Quad processor, GeForce 8800 Ultra and more.

HP Blackbird 002 LC Specifications
Case	Custom designed enclosure
Power Supply	900 watt
CPU	Intel Core 2 Quad QX6850 @ 3.33 GHz
Motherboard	HP LS Gaming PC 002-01A (aka Asus Striker Extreme 680i)
Memory	2GB Corsair Dominator PC2-8500
Hard Drives	150GB Western Digital Raptor X 10K RPM 750GB Western Digital SE16
Optical Drives	Super-multi-drive slim slot load, DVD+RW, etc LG Blu-Ray writer / HD-DVD reader
Video Cards	NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB (SLI ready)
Sound Card	On-board 8-channel audio
CPU Cooling	Factory sealed, maintenance free, liquid cooling unit
Operating System	Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit
Software	Grisoft AVG Professional Anti-virus 1-year subscription
Warranty	1 year limited hardware and 1 year tech support

Pretty impressive specs right off the bat.  The price on this system build is just about $4700 – not cheap by any stretch of the imagination but also not as much as that 3-way SLI system we reviewed a couple weeks ago.  The cost includes a lot price for the custom case enclosure that is worth every penny — but more on that later.