HP Blackbird 002 Revisited

Additional Testing and Information

Since we had the system for another couple of weeks, we did spend quite a bit more time testing things out. We're not going to bother with listing additional benchmark scores, as most of the updated scores are within a few percent of what we recorded in our initial review. We did discover a few areas that could use some additional tuning, specifically the memory configuration, and overall performance was improved by up to 5% just by tightening the timings and/or increasing the memory speed.

One of the oddities about the test system is that it was shipped with CrossFire 2900 XT 1GB cards. This seems to have been done more as proof that CrossFire is working on the Blackbird rather than for performance reasons. True, it would cost another $200 to upgrade to GeForce 8800 GTX SLI, but if gaming performance is your primary consideration and you're already spending over $5000, we definitely feel NVIDIA currently holds the upper hand. The latest NVIDIA Windows Vista driver release has removed any lingering doubts on this subject, but of course NVIDIA and AMD are both working on their next GPU updates and we may see those sooner rather than later.

We mentioned in the initial review that we had had a few system crashes/lockups. Those only occurred under continuous stress testing for several days, but it's still something that might concern a few people. It appears that HP has decided to ship overclocked QX6850 systems with a 3.33GHz clock speed instead of the 3.67GHz of our test system. While that does represent a 10% loss of performance in CPU intensive tasks, we can verify that even the rare instability issues we encountered went away at the slightly reduced clock speed. A little bit of fine tuning on the part of the end-user would likely allow a final CPU speed of around 3.5GHz while maintaining full stability, though obviously that will vary between CPUs. Increasing the memory voltage to 2.0V (without reducing the overclock) also seemed to help.

For the interested, we also did some quick noise level benchmarking. The difference in the amount of noise the system makes at full load and while idle is very small. Measured one foot from the left side of the case, we recorded 48 dB idle and 51 dB at load. That might seem pretty poor, but that was actually the worst location for noise measurements and objectively the noise levels seemed lower than what you would encounter with a regular air cooled setup. From the front and from the top, noise levels were 44 dB idle and 45 dB at load, so much of the noise seems to come through the ventilation on the left side of the case. Finally, sitting in a chair next to the system at a distance of about 4 feet, we recorded idle/load noise levels of 40/41.5 dB. By no means can this be considered a silent computer, but considering the amount of performance packed into the case the noise levels are very good.

There are a few other points of interest we wanted to touch on before we wrap up. First, Blackbird 002 is not meant to be a static offering. Instead, it will represent the top-of-the-line gaming offering from HP, and it will be updated with new components over time. Besides the aforementioned GPU updates that are almost certain to occur this fall, the CPU and chipset arenas aren't standing still either. HP will configure and ship an AMD based Blackbird starting in November utilizing the Athlon 64 X2 6000+; however, we don't see any point in bothering with such a processor right now. By far the more interesting AMD configuration will be whatever HP provides once Phenom starts shipping, and HP has committed to providing such a configuration.

Another subject that we discussed with Rahul Sood is the nForce 680i SLI ASUS motherboard with CrossFire support. He wouldn't tell us exactly who was responsible (other than that HP/VoodooPC was the driving force), but we can verify that there is a customized BIOS utilized on the motherboard and we were unable to flash a standard ASUS Striker using a copy of the BIOS. Rahul did state that they feel flexibility is one of the more important things about their motherboard selection, and they are evaluating all of the upcoming chipset releases (X38 from Intel and the various new SLI and CrossFire offerings from NVIDIA and AMD). We're fairly confident that whatever chipset they decide to use, they will continue to support both SLI and CrossFire on a single platform. Until we can get AMD and NVIDIA to drop the restrictions and open up things for all dual x16 motherboard offerings, this may represent the best compromise.

Finally, we asked Rahul about what sort of upgrade options they would offer people in the future. One of the benefits of purchasing a VoodooPC is that they will perform any system upgrades for you as long as you own the system. All you have to do is pay for shipping back to VoodooPC, and then pay for the wholesale price of the new hardware. They will upgrade the hardware, swap components as necessary, and clean up the wiring - all "free" of charge. (We're not quite sure about the wholesale pricing, however.) Rahul indicated that they are still trying to work out some sort of upgrade plan for the Blackbird, so if that's something you might find beneficial, keep an eye on the Blackbird website.