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