HP Blackbird 002 Exhilaration Edition

Verdict: Let down by the conservative overclock and off-the-shelf cooling.

Last year, Dell, the world's largest PC manufacturer, tried to muscle its way into the enthusiast PC market with its XPS 720 HC. While it had some commendable characteristics, such as its effective and quiet TEC-enhanced water-cooling and overclocked CPU, it was far less inspired when it came to build quality and component choice and failed to woo enthusiasts. Needless to say, one year on, the XPS 720 HC is no more.

This year, HP, in conjunction with Voodoo PC, has again attempted to make an enthusiast PC. Unlike Dell, HP can't be accused of skimping on materials. Its Dream PC entry, the Blackbird, is a considerably sturdier affair, with a case made from cast aluminium and no flimsy external plastic. The aluminium isn't just for show, either - its ribbed surface acts as a giant heatsink, helping to cool the components inside. The main body of the case is raised off the floor or desktop by a huge metal foot. Again, this isn't just a matter of aesthetics; the foot means that the 1.1kW Top Power PSU can be mounted upside down in the bottom of the case, drawing air in through a separate grille so that it doesn't heat up the rest of the PC.

Both side panels swing open on hinges, making it very easy to upgrade the Blackbird. Each side panel can be customised with a graphic insert - although we think it unlikely that many readers will appreciate the small Union Jack with which HP decided to decorate our review model. Quite frankly, it looks tacky and certainly isn't something you'd expect to see on a Dream PC.

A plethora of USB 2 and FireWire sockets, audio jacks and memory card readers are mounted in a very neat pop-up panel in the roof. This is neat way of keeping these otherwise dust-attracting holes tidy when they're not in use, although you have to be gentle when pushing the panel down - if you're too rough, it simply pops back up in an annoying 'jack-in-the-box' fashion.

Up to six hard disks can be installed in hot-swappable drive bays, which are mounted at 90 degrees to the front of the case. Our review model was fitted with a pair of 160GB Western Digital Raptor drives in RAID 0 configuration, in addition to a more spacious 1TB Seagate drive. The 5.25in bays were filled with two slot-loading TSST DVD writers and a tray-loading LG Blu-ray writer.

A removable plastic cover divides the case's main chamber into two sections. This separates the expansion card slots and the lower half of the motherboard from the CPU socket, DIMM sockets and VRMs. The lower section is cooled by a single 120mm fan, which sucks air in through the front panel and over the hard disks and expansion cards. In our system, these slots were filled by a pair of EVGA GeForce GTX 280 graphics cards. Unfortunately, they're not water-cooled, so they're pretty noisy. However, HP has overclocked the GPUs slightly, raising the core frequency from 602MHz to 632MHz. One PCI slot was filled by an X-Fi Extreme Gamer Fatal1ty sound card, leaving one 16x PCI-E 2.0 slot, one 1x PCI-E slot and one PCI slot free for future upgrades.

Unlike many mass-produced PCs, the Blackbird doesn't use proprietary components. Our review model was fitted with an EVGA motherboard based on the Nvidia nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset, but unlike the first Blackbird we saw, HP hasn't crippled the BIOS by removing most of the overclocking options. HP plumped for the most expensive LGA775 CPU it could find - the Core 2 Extreme QX9770. This CPU usually runs at 3.2GHz, but has been overclocked to 3.8GHz by raising its bus multiplier from 8 to 9.5. Although HP didn't have to raise the CPU vcore to achieve this overclock, the CPU is water-cooled by an Asetek LCLC. Thanks to its dual 120mm-fan radiator, it runs considerably cooler and quieter than the dire LCLC with a single 120mm-fan radiator we tested a few months ago. The radiator is mounted parallel with the roof of the case, with the two 120mm fans blowing hot air upwards and out of the case. The Blackbird has 4GB of Corsair DDR3 installed as standard, running at 1.6GHz at 8-8-8-24 timings.

In our stress test, the CPU temperature rose to 73ûC - significantly less than the CPU in the Scan, but the CPU in the Blackbird isn't as heavily overclocked as the Scan PC's. With the system working flat out, the PSU drew a not inconsiderable 622W from the mains - enough to keep your feet warm in the winter, but nowhere near as much power as the electricity-guzzling Scan.

A copy of 64-bit Vista Ultimate is installed on the Blackbird's RAID 0 disks, and it came with an interesting selection of peripherals. Without a shadow of a doubt, the pick of the bunch is the 30in HP LP3065 TFT. This monster of a monitor isn't particularly inspiring to look at, but the pictures it produces are stunning. The Bose Companion 5 speakers are far less desirable - they do a good enough job of playing back music, but games and movies sound flat. The mean-looking Razer Tarantula keyboard and Death Adder mouse are far more appealing, and should satisfy hard-core gamers who like a million and one extra buttons to configure for each and every game. Both input devices have been customised with glowing Blackbird logos, but the sleek effect is spoiled by a gap at the top of the keyboard where PC manufacturers usually stick their logo.

Performance

While performance isn't the primary criteria we use to select the winning Dream PC, record-breaking benchmark results certainly don't hurt. In our Media Benchmarks, which test a PC's ability to edit digital photos, encode video and run several applications simultaneously, the Blackbird scored a commendable 1,656 overall. However, while the Blackbird is reasonably quiet, that score would only place the Blackbird in 38th place on the benchmark leaderboard (www.custompc.co.uk/benchmarks).

Part of this disappointing result can no doubt be blamed on the comparatively small CPU overclock (3.2GHz to 3.8GHz), but even if HP didn't feel confident guaranteeing the CPU above 3.8GHz, it could have made the Blackbird faster than it currently is. This could have been achieved by raising the FSB instead of the bus multiplier, thereby providing the CPU with more memory bandwidth.

As the graphics cards are not water-cooled, the Blackbird is a noisy beast when gaming. However, it proved capable of running our four test games smoothly at 1,920 x 1,200. A single GTX 280 is fast, but two running together in SLI is enough to make games such as Call of Duty 4 a joy to play. However, it appears that Crysis still isn't able to take any significant advantage of SLI. The Blackbird achieved a minimum frame rate of 31fps in this game, but this is barely any faster than a single GTX 280. Equipped with the slowest CPU of all the Dream PCs, the Blackbird scored only 16,590 in Cinebench R10, while the 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage scores also left a lot to be desired.

Conclusion

Although the Blackbird is much cheaper than the other Dream PCs and isn't exactly slow, it lacks that certain 'je ne sais quoi' that a Dream PC needs. While the case is well made, it's not the most inspiring to look at, and the internal components are mediocre. It takes just minutes to install an off-the-shelf water-cooling kit such as the Asetek LCLC and a pair of air-cooled graphics cards, so it wouldn't be hard to build your own Blackbird, custom case notwithstanding. Even then, there are far better-looking cases available, many of which allow you to water-cool the graphics cards, cutting down on noise and perhaps even improving its overclocking abilities.