For many years, when people heard the name Hewlett Packard, you think of proprietary hardware, lowest common denominator specs, and ridiculous tech support.  So when HP said that they wanted to get into the lucrative gaming PC marketplace, hardcore PC gamers had to laugh, because people felt there was no way HP would understand the demographic of the market they wanted to target.  A couple years later and with the acquisition of Voodoo PC under their belt, the HP Voodoo Blackbird 002 has come to fruition, and shows that HP can do a gaming PC, albeit, at a premium cost.

HP sent Aeropause a brand new HP Voodoo Blackbird 002 to test and run through its specs and to their credit, it is an amazing rig.  No matter what I threw at it, it ground through it, with great numbers and astounding speed.  The rig that they sent me came in a huge 2 x 3 foot box on wheels and it was really funny watching the FedEx guy having to bring it up the seven steps in front of my house.  I am not sure if they all ship out this way, but check out the box to see how protective HP was about this PC.

The pricing for this Blackbird can range anywhere between $2800-$7200, and the one that they sent us was probably in the $5000 range.  It shipped with the new Intel QX6850 Penryn 45nm Quad Core, stock clocked at 3.0 GHz, 2 GBs of Corsair Dominator DDR2 RAM, 2 Geforce 8800 Ultra cards with 768 MB of RAM in SLi mode, 750 GB Western Digital SATA 3Gb Hard Drive with a 16MB cache, a BD-ROM drive, 7.1 SoundMAX onboard sound, and a rebranded Razer Tarantula keyboard and Diamondback mouse.  As you can see, the machine was not a slouch, and with all that power, it was almost whisper quiet, due to the entire system being water cooled.

The system came pre-installed with Windows Vista in 32 bit mode, which was a bit surprising, due to the power of the system, but 64 bit Vista is available at the time of purchase.  The boot time for Vista was pretty impressive, with a power on to functional desktop in about 45 seconds, which is pretty astounding when I look at my almost 2 minute plus boot time for Vista on my laptop.  Boot times can be further reduced with an optional solid state flash drive.

Accessibility and design are first and foremost with this system.  The case can be accessed without any tools, but it does come with an Allen wrench set for those hard to reach places.  The inside cowl swings out on hinges to get to the rest of the system.  The water tank and radiator are well integrated into the case and allow for optimum heat dissipation.  The side panels can be popped out and new designs can be substituted in their place, for the ultimate in customization. The case is attached to a foot that leaves about a four inch gap from the bottom of the case to the floor, which allows for good air flow from the bottom and out the top for radiator cooling.  The top front of the case has a pressure panel that pops up when you press on it.  It hides two USB ports, a headphone and audio jack, multi-slot card reader and a firewire port. 

The system was very responsive and smooth once inside Vista, with applications being highly responsive and quick.  I had no issues with Photoshop editing, and I noticed that the machines rip through most of the test scripts for Photoshop CS3 without breaking a heavy sweat.  Microsoft Office and video editing also benefitted from the power of this system, but to be honest, do we really care about how apps run, or how quickly it can put together a list of MP3 files on your PC.  This beast is built for one thing, and that is gaming.  Below is a list of games that I tested this gaming rig out with along with some frame rates and observations.

Crysis

No benchmark test nowadays can be complete without having Crysis at the top of the list.  Crytek has developed a great engine that squeezes all it can out of your rig.  It will use all four processors in a quad core system and every last drop of your video cards.  At first, I was a bit surprised at the performance as it was chugging along, at a far slower rate of speed.  I had a second set of eyes check it out and we both agreed that it was really jumpy.  Not the start I wanted for the game, but I started to check everything out and lo and behold, I noticed a three month old video card driver for the 8800 Ultras.  I immediately installed the 169.12 Forceware drivers and all was fixed and we started screaming along.

The first test ran Crysis at 1680×1050, No AA, Vsync Disabled, on Very High and was run for three passes.  In the end, we averaged 31.92 frames per second.  Not too shabby, but then I kicked it up a notch and ran the same test, but set anti-aliasing to 4x.  This resulted in a 27.57 frames per second, which is not a huge dip from the 4x and non-4x.  Turning down the detail settings to high, resulted in scores of 39.84 frames per second without AA, and 37.53 frames per second with AA, giving us a net of 10 frames difference between the two detail levels.

Unreal Tournament 3

While Unreal Tournament 3 did not sell all that well, I still decided that because it uses the Unreal Engine 3, that it would push the system.  The test was run at 1920×1200 resolution, 4x AA and detail at the highest level, and it never stumbled.  The average frame rate over two tests was 71.70 frames per second.  In one of the tests I performed, I ran a three minute time demo with a 16 on 16 bot match, with all details on, and it never really had an issue with the parameters, scoring a few frames above the average.

Stranglehold

The nice thing about using Stranglehold in a graphics test is that it is one of the poorer implementations of the Unreal Engine 3.0.  The game is kind of a blast in regards to being a lot of fun to unload thousands of bullets, but it has all kinds of problems with frame rate on my PC, so I thought testing this game on the Blackbird.  I ran three tests, with the settings at 1920×1200, 32 bit with all details on.  After the third test I checked out the data and saw an average of 59.91.  The three tests all came out remarkably similar, which I then found out is because of a frame limiter in the Unreal Engine.  There is a registry entry to disable it in UE 3.0, but I cannot seem to get it to work for Stranglehold.  That being said, the game had solid frame rates on this machine and gets high frame rates on with this game with brute force.

Gears of War

A long theme here in the benchmarks is another Unreal Engine based game.  I thought that Gears of War would be a nice test due to the extra overhead of Games for Windows Live service that runs behind the game.  I ran six frame rate tests at different points in the game and with varying screen action and again, I got a locked frame rate issue that I could not figure out.  The frame rate average after six tests was 60.47 frames per second.  I saw no issues with the GFW Live interface and speed of the system.  I did notice that some of the stutter after cut scenes had gone away, most likely due to the speed of the processor as well as the heftier video card.  The game was running at 1920×1200, with all detail on high and DX10 AA turned on.

Kane and Lynch: Dead Men

For our next test, I went with Kane and Lynch, because it is rather buggy and un-optimized for the PC at this point in time and has yet to receive a patch six months into its lifespan.  It also uses its own graphics engine loosely based on the Hitman: Blood Money engine.  I ran five tests in this game and had test scores all over the place.  I actually ran my tests twice over to make sure I was not getting an errata error, but the numbers were the same.  My averages on the system went anywhere from 17.75 to 53.25 frames per second.  The average of the five tests was 35.06 frames per second.  No matter what the level, I always seemed to have stutter in every test.  I do not think it is the machine, but I thought it would be interesting to see if the Blackbird could muscle out good numbers just on the power alone, and it could not get past the poor implementation.  The tests were run at 1920×1200, all details turned on and AA turned on full.

Test Drive Unlimited

While Test Drive Unlimited is a year old on the PC, it is still a rather visually stunning game, and has a lot of stuff going on in the display.  Rushing through the coastline on the east side of the island in traffic made up my two tests and I came out with fairly good numbers.  The numbers for this game were very respectable 56.65 frames per second in the game.  I honestly thought that the Blackbird would pull higher numbers in this game, so I have to wonder if it is an optimization issue, or a just a game with a frame limiter.  The test was run at 1920×1200, all details on highest setting and full AA turned on.

Colin McRae’s DiRT

Another racing game finds its way into this benchmarkapalooza, and this time, I found a rather new game that takes up all kinds of resources to run.  Many systems have had a hard time running this game at a high level of detail, while keeping steady frame rates.  The game ran rather smooth on the Blackbird, but it did show occasional hiccups when you had more than eight vehicles on the screen at one time.  A lot of this is due to the physics for all the vehicles as well as the particle effects, but overall, the average frame rate turned out to be pretty good, at 50.18 frames per second.    The tests were run at 1920×1200, all details turned on and full AA turned on.

Call of Duty 4

Infinity Ward’s gaming progeny, was on my list next to test and I expected big things from them, because of how well they have always adapted their games to the strengths of the PC.  I ran about a dozen different frame rate tests to see how it would fare and the Blackbird ripped though this game without any issues.  With the game on 1920×1200, all details on high and full AA, the game averaged 120.01 frames per second, which absolutely floored me.  The HP machine not only flew through the game, but it absolutely killed it, by never skipping a beat while testing it.  It could be that the game was written for the 360, which has some lesser hardware specs, but my understanding was that Call of Duty 4 for the PC was designed separately, but I could be wrong.

World in Conflict

The last game in our testing was the great RTS game, World in Conflict.  This game is visually stunning, putting a ton of elements on the screen at one time, completely taxing a computer system.  This I figured was another good game to see how the HP machine would fare.  Setting up the game to run at 1920×1200, all details on high and 4x AA, I ran the internal benchmark tool that comes with the game twice.  My average score over three tests was 37 frames per second.  The machine did take a big hit at the end of the timedemo, when the nuke drops and the rig dropped to its knees for a brief second to 18 frames per second.  It quickly recovered, but it was of note to see what it took to get this machine to really stress.  In day to day play, I never noticed any slowdowns, so it could be that the game throws everything it can into the timedemo benchmark.

So as you can see, the HP Voodoo Blackbird 002 ripped through just about every game that I threw at it, and I really did expect for it to do well, considering the specs.  But there were a few things that left me a bit flustered.  The biggest gripe was the Blu-Ray drive that came installed.  I noticed that installs took a lot longer with the Blu-Ray drive over a normal DVD drive.  It most likely has to do with the Constant speed of the drive, denying the opportunity speed up the drive on certain data segments.  You will definitely want to add a second standard DVD drive if you go with a Blu-Ray drive in this machine.  I also noticed the machine exhausts heat out of the top of the case, making for a rather hot area right above the machine.  You will definitely need to keep this area open and avoid putting anything on top of it that might melt.  Lastly, I had a hard drive in the machine that was a bit noisy.  I probably would not have noticed it on a normal system, but with the water cooling, there was no real fan noise to cover it up.  It is not a defect, but it was an interesting observation.

After two weeks with this machine, I have to say that I was highly impressed.  The modular design of the case was a welcomed change in design philosophy for HP.  It was fast, quiet and extremely powerful.  The system was stable and never locked up, which is a great testament considering that the machine shipped with Vista, which can be stubborn at times.  The price may scare some away due to the higher cost than building a machine of your own, but the great internal wiring and design shows what you are paying for when you buy one of these machines.  A few flaws keep it from being perfect, but in the long run, if you have the cash to put down on one of these machines, go out and do it, because you will be highly impressed.  The HP Voodoo Blackbird 002 gets a 4.5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.