HP Announces New Gaming PC – Blackbird 002

Many people, including myself have been shouting loudly for a dedicated gaming PC from HP and just at the right time they’ve done it.

It’s known as the Blackbird 002. Awesome naming in my opinion, it’s surely chosen to make people think of this, one of the coolest and most beautiful aircraft ever designed.

But, I’m sure you want to see it as much as I did, here are some images of the HP Blackbird 002 (more here).

Now that hopefully your heart is beating a little faster, I’m sure there are a bunch of details you’d like to know.

As with all PC’s from HP and VoodooPC, it’s going to be a configurable purchase (from October 1st). This means that I can’t give you a precise answer of what the machine will cost. However in the press release it makes a promising comment:

“Hardcore and enthusiast gamers find consumer PCs underpowered for games performance and prefer stylish design. Boutique gaming PCs offer gamers power and style, but only at a premium price…the HP Blackbird 002 combines style, performance and upgradability at a price competitive with upper-end consumer desktops.”

The first version that will go on sale is the “dedicated edition”. In contrast to the standard version, this is a preconfigured box which will be limited to 518 units and is available on September 15th. It’s a formidable machine in anyone’s language with an Intel Core 2 Extreme 3.0Ghz CPU, dual 8800 GTX Ultra’s with liquid cooling on both CPU and each GPU, custom side panel, a game bundle (that sounds like a good idea) including the ‘Orange Box’ Half Life series, 3 month trial of GFW Live and Windows Vista Ultimate.

It’s hard to guess a price on this, but based on my previous analysis of HP models, I would expect this to be retailing at about $3499 without a monitor. What I would hope is that the standard edition could be configured to this level for $2999 (though this seems unlikely) and a cut down version with perhaps a single 8800 GTX and some other sacrifices could scrape in the under $2500 price point.

This seems like a possible outcome with HP saying that the configurable model will range from $2500 to $7100 (presumably huge hard drives and monitors).

We’ll know a lot more on September 15th when we see a price for the Blackbird 002 dedicated edition and even more when the standard edition goes on sale on October 1st.

This looks like a great product from HP, today I’m proud to be an employee and even happier that I have shares in the company. I might even buy one for myself, will you?

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Full details of the Blackbird 002 can be found at www.hp.com/blackbird

Bioshock PC Demo – Amazing!

Ok, ok.  There’s a lot of hyperbole going around the web about this game.  But each person brings their own justification for their comments to the table, and ultimately their justification is more important than their one-liner.

As a side note, it’s pulling great reviews, currently averaging 9.49 (I’m assuming that means the same thing as 94.9%) on gamerankings.  That’significantly better than the New Super Mario Bros and marginally better than Gears of War.

But why did I think it was amazing?  Because of the hardware I have at home.  I’m running a nearly two year old PC with an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (overclocked) and an Asus 6600GT.

I figured I was wasting my time on the 1.8GB download after negative experiences with a bunch of new games including Dirt and World In Conflict which didn’t scale at all well.  I’m not a graphics junky but if the game performs so badly that it looks worse than Total Annihilation or some rally game from the nineties then I’m not going to pay any attention.

Bioshock was different.  I’m not going to give any spoilers, but after the initial cut scene, when you’re given control I sat staring at my screen for a full minute refusing to believe that those were in-game graphics.   Everything else that has been said about the demo is all true, the sound is great, the timing reveals just enough to keep you wanting more and the fighting scenes are intense.

I hope Bioshock for the PC sells millions of copies.  Companies need to learn that there are a lot of people out there with machines slightly less powerful than the Xbox 360 and significantly less powerful than today’s machines who still want to buy new games and be blown away.  It really is worth tweaking your game to get the most out of our machines, we’ll thank you with our wallets.

I’m not usually a horror fan and so I was just playing the demo to be ‘part of the crowd’ but now I’ve been converted.  I’m definitely going to be playing this game, and if you have a PC which was a good gaming PC within the last three years, I think you should download the demo and give it a go.

Bioshock PC Demo is Out…kind of

Update 21/8/07 – 07:15 GMT:

Well, many hours have gone past and the file still hasn’t appeared on fileplanet and my download from the site below has failed a couple of times. The torrent is still heavily oversubscribed but is beginning to shift towards a favorable position.

20/8 – 17:30 GMT: 348 Seeds vs 4541 Peers (13 to 1)
20/8 – 22:00 GMT: 490 vs 5787 (11.8 to 1)
21/8 – 07:15 GM: 1230 vs 5142 (4.2 to 1)

I’m at 31.1% completed but my uploads have been hammered at 222.1% of the file size. Hopefully I’ll be playing the demo by the time I get home tonight.

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Well, the Bioshock PC demo is out, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at fileplanet.com which has been headlining the hosting of it.

Today any reference to the demo is mysteriously missing from the site, and even searching fails to bring any result (at least for me). This leads me to the conclusion that fileplanet is struggling to meet demand from their own paying users, so have closed off access to everyone else.

But don’t be too concerned, you can download it in the conventional way from here or do it via the torrent here.

I’ve got both running at the moment until I see which one is faster. The torrent is heavily loaded (348 seeds to 4541 peers (that’s 13-1)) but this could swing in the next few hours as more users finish the download. The direct download is heavily loaded too though. In the last few hours about 30,000 downloads have occured, that’s 54,000GB. Nice.

As we move into the US evening, the demand is going to get even higher, so I’d recommend you get in while you still can.

What I’ve Been Playing

Hotel Dusk: Room 215

This is a game I picked up purely on hype. When it came out in the states it came in under the radar and this piqued the interest of many game journalists. It seemed to polarise opinions, you loved it or hated it. But for the most part, it had more lovers than haters so I decided I wanted to give it a go.

In summary it’s a partially animated, story based adventure game for the Nintendo DS which involves wandering around a hotel, plodding your way through the story. You play as Kyle Hyde an ex-cop who is at the hotel to find some items for his boss and to further his own agenda of finding an old friend.

On the whole, I’m enjoying it. I’m quite a reader, and love immersing myself in a story. However, I have to say that I’d rather be reading this book than playing this game.

My biggest critisicm is how damn linear it is. At any point there is one, and only one, thing that you have to do to progress the story. For example you need to talk to a particular person or find a particular item. If you don’t know what you need to do, you find yourself wandering around trying to stumble on that trigger and it completely takes you out of the story. There’s even been a couple of times when I’ve had to look up a walkthrough in order to continue, the cardinal sin of game design.

On the positive side, I loved the art style and the animation. The characters were compelling and the localisation was outstanding, it’s hard to believe this game was originally Japanese.

This game is a perfect example of the fact that 6.5 – 7.5 is a good score. I’m glad this game exists, I’m glad I played it, and I would recommend it to someone who has similar interests, but it sure doesn’t deserve an 8 or 9.

HP Should Bundle Gaming PC with Crysis

Even though this site is still in it’s infancy, I like to think that there’s a chance that someone within HP who has responsibility for marketing or business development will read my thoughts (and maybe offer me a relocation!)

HP have been struggling in their desktop division (public knowledge) because there are very slim margins. It traditionally has relied on it’s brand selling PC’s, but this doesn’t work for the majority of gamers.

However, I would argue that gamers do value the HP brand and would like to own an HP PC, if they felt they were getting value for money and that HP was actually considering their thoughts, opinions and values.

I’ve been harping on about HP needing a few new PC’s focussed on gamers. Hundreds of thousands of gamers around the world are waiting to buy a new PC for the Vista/Directx 10 generation, they’re just waiting for the right reason. For a huge proportion of that group, Crysis is that reason.

For those living in a cave, Crysis is a FPS, AAA PC only title from the makers of Far Cry. It is by far the most anticipated PC title of 2007 (due in November in time for Christmas).

So what do I think HP should do?

(1) Build a high end desktop PC for $2499. Feature the best dual-core CPU, top quality RAM, at least 400GB HD in raid, a decent widscreen LCD and an 8800 GTX.

(2) Talk to EA and bundle Crysis in for free, it’s a low cost to bear compared to the cost of the machine.

(3) This is the key point, you might say a USP (unique selling point). Benchmark Crysis on the machine and advertise excellent framerates.

A new gaming PC will make news, bundling Crysis will put it right out there and providing benchmark results will be revolutionary.

HP love their margins and for good reason (after all I am a shareholder). You can get them, you just have to think slightly outside the box.

HP Releasing New Gaming Focussed PC…Four Years Ago

Yes, that’s right, I was about to write a post about the new gaming desktop HP was releasing, based on these two pages.

Dated August 11th and 12th I was wondering how I had missed that announcement. That is until I saw one of them talking about the unconfirmed machine including a Pentium 4 processor. Huh? The nail finally hit the coffin when the article said “Gamers have expressed excitement about AMD’s Athlon 64 CPU“.

It’s interesting though, how apart from the actual content of the new PC, HP is in the same position now as it was four years ago, needing to add more gaming focussed desktop PC’s to their range. Surely we would never see a new gaming range under the compaq brand. Surely?

HPGB – Quarterly Buying Guide – Edition 1

When I consider the niche that this blog serves, there’s one question which I believe must be answered.

“What HP PC should I buy for my PC gaming needs?”

So, beginning now, approximately every three months, I will attempt to produce a guide which recommends an HP desktop PC in three price brackets; < US$1000, $1000 – $2000 and $2000 – $3500. Above $3500 you should just go over to VoodooPC and pick up the biggest, most expensive PC they sell. This guide is going to be known as the Quarterly Buying Guide (QBG).

So, what am I judging these PC’s on? Well, at the moment, I’m not getting my hands on any of these machines, so my picks will be somewhat subjective and based on the hp.com availability and prices. I’ll be scoring the machines in four categories; Processing Power, Storage Space, Graphics Grunt and Screen Size.

The score will be out of five.

So you should expect only the $2k -$3.5 category to score at twenty or near to it. However, if HP are bundling a ‘five’ lcd in a sub $1k PC, then that’ll stand out like a sore thumb.

Also, these models are the US models. If you’re interested in HP models available in the UK or elsewhere, comment on this post and if I have sufficient demand, I’ll look at including other countries in the future. Until then, take a look at the specifications of these models and try to match them with models available in your country.

Results

Less Than $1000

Well, it’s only the first edition of this guide and already HP is failing. I couldn’t configure a desktop PC to a level that I could recommend (and keep my conscience clear) for under $1000, but I got close.

I picked the AMD based a6150e.

The a6150e is one of HP’s ‘entertainment and multimedia’ focussed PC’s. The reason it ended up being the winner of this category is effectively flexibility. If I’d had complete flexibility in component selection then I’m pretty confident HP could have provided me with perfect candidates in each of the three categories.

The limiting factor to my selections in this category was the graphics card. Various Directx 10 video cards were available, but only the top card, the 512MB 8500GT was acceptable. Be warned, if you get anything lower than this, you’ll definitely regret it in the long term and may regret it imediately.

For the processor I chose the cheapest (AMD Athlon(TM) 64 X2 4000+ dual-core @ 2.1GHz ). It’s my opinion that unless you upgrade other components, the processor is unlikely to be the bottleneck.

It also features 2GB of DDR2 memory, integrated 7.1 sound and a 19″ lcd monitor. The other area I had to cut to get close to the $1000 budget was the hardrive, which is just 160GB.

Scores

Processing Power – 2
Storage Space – 2
Graphics Grunt – 3
Screen Size – 2

Total – 9

Conclusion

Ultimately, this is a machine I would recommend to a friend. This says a lot. The fact that I couldn’t configure a machine under $1k that I was happy with shows that HP are missing something.

It’s obvious that if you have a bigger budget you can improve your experience, but unless you want more hard disk space or screen size, then you should stick with this model all the way up to about $2200 where you can get a cut-down version of our category 3 winner.

$1000 – $2000

Again, the PC I’d want is just out of this bracket, but we’ll come to that later. This is the sweetspot for HP PC’s and you can tell. There were plenty of options, but ultimately, lack of flexibility in the choices of some of the other models left me choosing the Pavilion d4990y.

This is the most suitable model for a gamer, and I ended up configuring three different version for different price levels.

The winner of this category came in at $1974.99. Also worth mentioning is the m8100y, a media centre PC which I was able to configure to a slight lower level for $1964.98. The reason I mention it is that it has a more powerful processor than the d4990y.

Again, the graphics of this machine is the 8500GT. What I really would have liked is the option of an 8600GT, but this wasn’t available.

The processor is the Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo processor E6700 (2.66GHz), we have 2GB of memory and a 19″ LCD. The real reason this was the winner of this category though is that I was able to include two hard drives, giving 800GB in RAID. This would mean that you would get excellent performance in applications which make many requests to the hard drive (loading levels in games or video editing for instance) and is a must in my own next PC.

Scores

Processing Power – 3.5
Storage Space – 5
Graphics Grunt – 3
Screen Size – 2

Total -13.5

Conclusion

If I was going to buy an HP desktop, this is pretty close to the machine I would buy. If you shell out your money on this one, then you should be happy. Eventually you may want to upgrade your graphics card though.

$2000 – $3500

Having looked at quite a few models, there wasn’t really a lot jumping out in this category. So I took my d4990y and added the item I most wanted and had to leave out from the previous category, the 8800 GTS graphics card. This took it well into the $2000’s but I still had plenty of budget to spend, so I upped the screen size and storage space.

I still had money to spend, so this is obviously another area that HP is missing. I even went over to VoodooPC to see if I could get anything down to the $3500 level, no luck. It certainly seems that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for HP to ‘Invent’ a new brand in this segment.

So our high end machine cost $2989.99 and featured a 8800 GTS, Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo processor E6700 (2.66GHz), 2GB of 800mhz memory, 1TB Raid hard drive setup and an HP 22″ LCD monitor.

Scores

Processing Power – 4
Storage Space – 5
Graphics Grunt – 4.5
Screen Size – 4

Total -17.5

Conclusion

This is a nice PC, but you’re spending a lot of money so you would expect that. This machine is very much future proof. You’ve got a very good graphics card, as bigger LCD monitor as some people say is practical and an amount of RAID hard drive space that is pretty amazing to me.

But if I was spending $3000 I would want the 8800GTX and this was not an option, which is somewhat surprising.

All in all, if you want an HP PC to use for gaming, then you can certainly get one, but HP has a lot of work to do if they really want to align their offerings with the tastes and preferences of PC gamers.

Latest VoodooPC Hardware – Envy H:201

Well, it’s time to round out my series on the current offerings of VoodooPC with an overview of the Envy H:201.

In my simpleton logic, this machine has the highest number, so must be the best, or at least the most powerful.

Weighing in at 16 pounds (7.25kg) and between US$5400 and US$7600, it would certainly seem that way.

This machine is optimised for gaming and as a media centre.  The drawbacks of this machine, namely battery life and weight are proclaimed loudly, almost as a shield of honour.

It also proclaims to be the first dual SLI notebook.  There’s a good reason for that, dual SLI notebooks don’t make sense!

But then ‘making sense’ probably isn’t the drawcard of buying this machine.  You will most likely never meet someone with a notebook more powerful than yours, and when you say “it has dual SLI graphics” they’ll probably make the desired “oooh” noise that you shelled out $US7000 for.

It features a 20″ widescreen lcd, various options for the processor and a range of options for graphics (not including a Directx 10 option).

I imagine the boys and girls at VoodooPC are frantically testing the mobile Directx 10 cards that they have recently received.  When they are in a position to include these as an option, this will probably be the machine they’re added to, as it is indeed the only machine in the laptop range which actually allows you to choose your graphics card and the only one that has no requirements for battery life or weight.

Latest VoodooPC Hardware – Envy H:171

Image Credit: engadget.com

The recently released VoodooPC Envy H:171 is billed as a desktop replacement notebook.

It has a massive 17.1″ screen but weighs in at nearly 12 pounds (5.4kg). Not a weight you would want to be carrying from meeting to meeting and then onto a plane.

It is optimised for gaming and as a media centre and has hardware well suited to meet these requirements.

It starts at US$5400 with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 operating at 2.4ghz and an Nvidia GeForce 7950 512MB MxM for your graphics. At the high end, you could be paying US$6800 (before any custom paint jobs) which will buy you an upgrade to the Core 2 Extreme X6800 but leave you with the same Directx9 graphics.

We did have a comment from VoodooPC that they had only recently received the Directx 10 cards from Nvidia and would soon incorporate them in their models.

In my short experience I think it’s unlikely that this upgrade will be a hidden option, it’s more likely they will launch a new model with Directx 10 being it’s key selling point. I’ll keep you updated on that one.

Latest VoodooPC Hardware – Envy M:172

The M:172 seems to be a relative newcomer to the VoodooPC range. It doesn’t even have a description on their site. However they do claim that it is optimised for gaming, digital content creation, home or small office and as a media centre.

It starts at US$4794 and ranges as high as US$5586 (more with the different paint jobs).

It features the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and an Nvidia GeForce 7950 512MB MxM graphics chip.

Predictably, there’s nothing much on the web (in English) regarding this model. However it looks like it may be in a bit of a sweet spot. The ‘M’ tells us that it is still in VoodooPC’s ‘middleweight’ category, but with the Core 2 Duo and 7950, this is a machine I would seriously consider as a gaming machine.

It is worth mentioning that this graphics option is Directx 9, not Dirextx 10. None of the VoodooPC models outlined so far have the option. I’ll be interested to see whether either of the ‘H’ models are Dirext10 capable.