GTX 280 in SLI for HP's Blackbird 002

Perhaps we all saw this coming a mile away: as soon as NVIDIA went official with its new graphics card lineup, major system vendors like HP have rushed to release their own implementation of the new cards. Since HP also happens to be among those vendors that can pride themselves with a mean-looking desktop gaming rig, its latest product announcement comes as no surprise.

For those of you that don't know, HP has acquired systems builder Voodoo PC a while ago. The result of that acquisition was the release of HP's new Blackbird 002 gaming system, a well-crafted desktop computer capable of providing support for the latest hardware technologies. The latest addition to the Blackbird 002 lineup comes to provide users with the graphics power of the latest NVIDIA GeForce card, the GTX 280. And, because everybody is expecting this card to deliver impressive high-level graphics quality, the new Blackbird 002 Exhilaration edition should be something to please all of you gaming enthusiasts out there.

The only thing you might "dread" when it comes to this edition is the price tag it comes with, since according to the manufacturer's site, it is expected to go up of $6.600. So you'd better start a separate budget for it, because this monster of rig is not coming cheap. Then again, if you are a gaming enthusiast, you already know that building or purchasing a high-performance system takes quite a lot of financial efforts.

On the technical side, this monster comes with two GeForce GTX 280 graphics cards connected in SLI mode. A liquid cooled Intel QX9770 quad-core extreme processor is going to provide you with the necessary computing power to run the latest PC games. The system is built on an approved NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra motherboard and can provide a minimum of 2 GB of Corsair's 1600MHz DDR3 memory.

So, if you want to benefit from the latest in hardware technology, HP is ready to give you what you need. One last thing, though: be sure you can afford it before you even start dreaming of it.