HP Has Not Forgotten Gamers: Blackbird Goes Quad-Core

We have got used to Hewlett-Packard taking care of expensive, corporate server systems and we have forgotten that HP is not only blade servers and Opteron racks, but also home entertainment and aggressive gaming. Although the PC vendor holds the top for server system sales, it is also concerned with attracting gamers on its side.

Hewlett-Packard has just announced a new desktop gaming system, the Blackbird 002 alpha, that comes with a brand-new 45nm Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 quad-core processor built with the chip manufacturer's latest technology. The QX9650 chip is produced with Hi-K hafnium-based metal gate transistors, that boosts the computing performance, while keeping power consumption to a minimum.

Intel's High-K gate technology replaces the classical silicon dioxide with a thicker hafnium-based high-k material in the gate dielectric, that reduces the transistor gate leakage, thus preserving energy and avoiding overheating.

"We're thrilled to offer gamers the speed and strength of the new Intel architecture," said CTO of HP's global gaming unit Rahul Sood, in a statement. "The HP Blackbird 002 was designed to redefine the gaming experience and delight even the hardest-core user. Intel's new technology helps us to continue to deliver on that promise."

The Blackbird 002 alpha gaming rig comes with dual ATI Adeon X2900 video cards with 1 GB of video RAM, 2 GB of system memory, an 160 GB 10,000 rpm hard drive, a 16× combo drive, a 15-in-1 memory card reader and a 16× DVD±RW drive. Additionally, the system also features an Ageia PhysX 100 Series PCI-E accelerator card to boost hardware accelerations in the supported games (such as Unreal Tournament III). The system CPU is cooled with a liquid-cooling solution that comes factory-sealed to prevent leakage.

The Blackbird 002 Alpha comes with Microsoft Vista Home Premium and sells for a starting price of $5,499. The QX9650 quad-core processors are also available on Omen desktop systems from VoodooPC, but they won't be any cheaper.