HP Firebird Packs Sleekly Designed Punch
A high-powered, sleekly designed gaming tower set to be released later this week is catching the awe and attention of PC lovers.Â
Reviewers are calling the HP Firebird one of the most innovative performance PC’s ever created encased in an attention grabbing design.
News of HP’s Firebird gaming PC leaked a few weeks ago, but the official announcement came Tuesday morning.
Experts contend that unlike the first Voodoo HP product, the HP Blackbird 002, the Firebird is aimed primarily at mainstream PC gamers.
The NVIDIA Corporation says its new product strikes a critical balance between performance and energy efficiency. The firm says the HP Firebird offers stunning graphics and CUDA performance.
"The HP Firebird is one of the most innovative and versatile performance PCs ever created. It’s an engineering tour-de-force that could only be accomplished with GeForce GPUs, NVIDIA SLI, and Hybrid SLI," said Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of the GeForce Business Unit at NVIDIA.
"These technologies give the HP Firebird extraordinary capabilities in a remarkably compact design."
The tower includes technology that is one-fifth the size of typical graphics cards and uses approximately one-half the power.
The graphics are supposedly lightning-fast while maintaining HD resolution.
"The cutting-edge design of the HP Firebird uses several innovations from NVIDIA to make it one of the world’s first hybrid high-performance PCs," said Rahul Sood, chief technologist for the Voodoo brand in the Personal Systems Group at HP.
"In a market full of gas-guzzling SUV gaming PCs, we designed a high-performance PC that sips power. This is one of the first desktop PCs that combines NVIDIA SLI with Hybrid SLI to enable screaming performance when you need it and energy efficiency when you don’t."
Two models will be available on Friday, January 9th. The Firebird 802 will be available for $1,799 and the Firebird 803 for $2,099.
Both towers offer HDMI and DVI video outputs, liquid CPU and GPU cooling, as well as an external 350-watt power supply and a variety of other inputs and small-scale expansion slots.
Technology reviewer Rich Brown of CNET.com said he had a reservation with the graphics cards and the pricing.
Brown wrote, “HP uses Nvidia’s MXM laptop GPU in these systems, a standard Nvidia developed to enable laptop manufacturers to swap different graphics chips into their portables. Given laptops’ thermal and power sensitivities, MXM has not caught on as a consumer-swappable standard, as with desktop graphics cards. By using MXM HP has improved the thermal, power, and noise issues typical of standard gaming PCs, but it has also essentially killed the Firebirds’ upgrade path.”
To compare the Firebirds’ price with similar products, consider the $2,499 Velocity Micro desktop released in November. Experts say it may outperform either Firebird, and although it costs $400 more than the Firebird 803 it also offers upgradeability that HP’s new system can’t.
“By introducing a slick-looking, fast-enough system with no configuration variability, HP removes a good deal of the guesswork and gives gamers a system that simply works. As much as that might make the DIY and upgrade crowd cringe, that’s all many people want,” wrote Brown.
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