Hewlett-Packard is looking to cast a spell on the PC gaming industry with its first product developed with Voodoo PC.
The HP Blackbird 002 is the first joint effort with Voodoo, the Canadian enthusiast PC maker that HP purchased a year ago. HP is expected to unveil the souped-up PC at a special event in New York on Wednesday evening.
The Blackbird is an all-black, all-aluminum gaming machine that can be configured however the customer wants. The BIOS (basic input-output system) is completely open, and none of the inner components are proprietary, meaning the customer can buy replacement parts off the shelf of any PC supply store.
The shape of the machine should catch some eyes too--the chassis hovers on an aluminum foot. Though it's a flashy design, it's actually a utilitarian measure: it's a sixth side of the box for air to flow out of, which helps combat one of the biggest problems with enthusiast PCs--overheating. The Blackbird also uses a full liquid-cooling system and isolates each of the PC's heat sources in their own thermal chambers to further reduce the temperature output.
The Blackbird is a bold first move from HP, as it takes a step into the ring with other high-end PC makers, particularly Dell, which has the popular XPS line and scooped up Alienware earlier last year.
The gaming market has ballooned in recent years. The worldwide market for PC gaming-influenced hardware purchases will produce $10 billion in revenue annually by the end of 2007, according to Ted Pollak, senior game industry analyst for Jon Peddie Research.
In a computing niche that leans heavily on design, the Blackbird shows careful attention was paid to detail both inside and out, industry observers say.
Photos: HP's Blackbird sings a gaming tune
"Inside, very few products have that level of fit and finish--polished metal and solid aluminum is typically something you see in a high-end automobile--even than you'd see in the most expensive gaming PCs," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. "This approach is at the Lexus (or) Mercedes quality level and build level."
The car analogy is actually quite germane. The outer aluminum casing for the Blackbird is made by a Chinese manufacturer whose specialty isn't consumer electronics or computers, but car doors.
Then, each is configured top to bottom in Voodoo's newly expanded Calgary production facility by the same engineer, said Mark Solomon, HP Gaming's creative director. But you don't have to be a mechanic or even nominally adept with the contents of a toolbox to swap out parts and make your own upgrades. Blackbird is intentionally designed so that any of the components--CPU, GPU, hard drive, optical drive--can be swapped out.
HP hopes that touches like these will lure creative and gaming types with plenty to shell out on a custom performance PC. Priced between $2,500 and $6,500 depending on the configuration, it's firmly within the company of other high-end performance PCs.
"The pricing is pretty aggressive at the lower end for an elite system," Pollak said. "It's surprisingly affordable."
For a certain segment of the market anyway. But paying up to five figures for a gaming machine is not unusual in this relatively small segment of the overall PC market, where the margins are considerably higher. So HP is putting a lot of resources into the performance and the aesthetics. The design and manufacture process is much pricier than the average HP notebook or desktop PC.
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