VoodooPC Launch ‘Quite’ Powerful Notebook

In news out today, VoodooPC has released a new Notebook PC, labelled the ENVY H:171.

If my title sounds a bit anti-HP, then blame it on what seems like hyperbole from whoever writes these press releases. The title of the press release was “VoodooPC Smashes Industry Records with Next-Gen Notebook PC” however these ‘industry records’ were not mentioned and even Rahul Sood, CTO of HP Gaming even called it “one of the fastest and most powerful 17-inch notebooks on the market”.

The is undoubtedly a rock solid notebook. The processor is one of the best available, and the machine comes equipped with an impressive 600GB of storage via three 200GB drives. Along with the next point, this abundance of storage leads me to believe this machine is not primarily for Voodoo’s gaming market. After all, this sounds like a superb machine for graphical design, video editing and other content generation. But onto my uninformed theory.

It’s a fact about technophiles that when you see a list of hardware specs, you look for what’s not there not what is.

This machine is aimed towards high-end gamers and what’s top of the mind for gamers at the moment is DirectX 10 support. However this unit features Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® Go 7950’s.

“So,” I thought “why no DirectX 10 chips?”

“They’re out.”

“They’re even in another HP notebook.”

“Or perhaps it could have something to do with the rumoured problems Nvidia was having with these chips,” (which Nvidia denied).

Many desktop PC gamers (including myself) have been waiting for a shakedown in the DirectX 10 market before they jump in. The fact that VoodooPC is shunning the DirectX 10 chips in favour of high-end DirectX 9 should encourage notebook gamers to do the same.

Update (19th July):  I’ve received a comment from Rahul regarding the lack of Directx 10 chips.  Apparently this notebook has been available for a few weeks from the VoodooPC site.  The new chips have just become available and should be available for this notebook soon.

Pete Corin is an HP employee but works outside of HP Gaming and has no knowledge (unless stated otherwise) of any internal decisions, strategies or policies related to HP Gaming. Any opinions written here are those of Pete and not Hewlett-Packard Ltd.