Blackbird 002 takes off

THE HP BLACKBIRD 002 – first-born lovechild of Voodoo PC and HP, has finally come under the scope of reviewers at Digital Trends (who apparently speak Californese). As they put it, it’s a no-holds barred affair. HP pulled out every stop to market the ultimate gaming machine, with the latest Intel chippery and a tweaked ASUS mobo supporting both SLI and Crossfire. Mandatory attendance if you’re into gaming. By the way, this young bird sings to the tune of $5000.

Guru3D – we haven’t talked about them for a while now – get their Phenom 9700 review posted after a few setbacks on their Spider platform. Mixed feelings about the Phenom here, the test results are on par with the Q6600. AMD seems to have hit the pricing on the nose but performance is just short of the Q6600. It’ll become more competitive as it scales towards higher clocks, believes the author.

Like we mentioned a few days ago, graphics cards are host to very innovative solutions – and in this case Expreview tests a watercooled Zotac 8800GT (which we didn’t find on the Zotac.com page), however. This watercooled Zotac 8800GT uses a pump and radiator combo in a specially built 5.25-inch enclosure. The amazing bit is that it cools the 8800GT to levels you won't believe. It needs some kinks worked out of it, though, as the connectors are a bit iffy.

Gigabyte isn’t really known for its cases, but apparently they have them – and are tricking them out to meet the requirements of certain market segments. Here’s one example at Madshrimps, the 3D Mercury ATX tower. The case has a pre-installed liquid cooling system and is high-performance/low-maintenance. Lots of features to help out the modder/user, but a price tag that’ll make you think twice: €389.

Best of Micro has published a piece from Tom’s Hardware France. A guide to troubleshooting console connections to the world wide wibble. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s straightforward and will help the PC crowd with their on-line gaming this Holiday season. Life saver if you want to impress your kids/nephews at the family Christmas reunion.

Futurelooks tests the Thermaltake V1 CPU Cooler, whose design many of you are bound to recognize from several hardware review sites. The V1 looks like an automobile engine mounted on top of your CPU, and installation issues aside, Future Looks gave it high scores (8.5/10). It takes up some real estate on your mobo, so don’t expect to have your graphics card with exotic cooling running side-by-side with this one.

Techware Labs, always in search of the ultimate mod, has tripped on an igloo of sorts, the ingeniously named GlacialTech Igloo 5710 CPU Cooler (is GlacialTech aware that the function of an igloo is to capture heat?). It’s not domed, mind you, but it’s pretty silent, according to the reviewer. The only snag is that it’s pretty run o’ the mill when it comes to cooling. Heartily rejected for gaming, but approved for “silent” office operations.

Small Net Builder airs a “Linksys WRT350N Wireless-N Gigabit Router with Storage Link”, ie: a gigabit MIMO router you can attach USB storage to, that’s not to be confused with “Robby the Robot’s second-cousin surrendering" action figure. The WRT350N is cheap(ish), more so than its big brother, the WRT600N, and the performance is more than enough for most work environments. WPA2 performance is particularly good, and you can share a hard drive through the integrated USB host, however no info on directory/file system support.

OCInside has come up with a funky tool on their website. It’s an interactive Intel CPU Guide. Just click through the drop-down menus and select the CPU that you’re interested in. When it's finally selected it’ll just spit out the main specs on the chip, including bus, clock, socket, TDP, cache, process and 64-bit support. µ