reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized
holiday 2007 MAXIMUMPC 81
power hogs). The PSU is mounted at the
bottom of the case, which is elevated by
a large aluminum foot to allow cool air to
enter the case from the bottom as well as
the sides. Cable management is simplified
by modular power plugs, but there’s more
to it than that. The SATA cables for the hard
drives, for example, are routed to a set of
sockets mounted on an internal backplane.
The drives are mounted on trays that slide
into a rack and plug into this backplane.
Two vertically mounted slot-fed DVD burn-
ers are hidden inside the case’s heatsink-like
grill, with only LED-lit eject buttons revealing
their presence. The case can accommodate a
third (tray type) optical drive next to the other
two. An equally well-disguised pop-up module
on top of the case harbors a 15-in-1 media-card reader, jacks for a headphone and mic,
two USB ports, and a FireWire port.
We’re excited about many of the
Blackbird’s innovations, but HP’s decision
to send us a Vista PC severely undermined
the machine’s gaming benchmark numbers
(including a Quake 4 performance that was
slower than our aging zero-point rig’s). “What
about DX10?” you ask. “Pretty much irrelevant
for now,” we say. And while we applaud the
company’s decision to enable CrossFire on an
nForce motherboard, our experience has been
that Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800
Ultra are both faster than the Radeon HD 2900
XT (although the GTX’s edge evaporates when
running Vista).
Buy this machine and you won’t care
which camp wins the next skirmish in theGPU wars because you’ll be covered either
way—as rightly you should be. That’s just one
of the features that endow the Blackbird 002
with such potential for greatness. Yes, this PC
deserves so much better than Vista.
—Michael Brown$5,500, http://www.hp.comhp blackbird 002raven
Awesome design using stan-
dard components; CrossFire
running on nForce.
craven^7
Videocard driver crash bug;
unimpressive gaming perfor-
mance (due to Vista).removing the Blackbird’s access panel reveals beauty that’s more than skin deep.