Voodoo's Blackbird spreads its wings

HP bought Voodoo to form VoodooHP, and with the launch of its first product, the Blackbird 002, it is clear that this hasn't happened at HP.

A few days ago, Rahul Sood previewed his new baby at a little shindig in San Francisco, and now it's launched for real. The short story, where others add plastic, paint and LEDs, Voodoo HP seems to have put the time, effort and money into doing things right. Bauhaus engineering if you will.

The Blackbird 002 is defined by its case, a solid cast aluminium case made by a Chinese car parts manufacturer. It may look like a chintzy plastic toy, but it definitely is not. The solid foot on the bottom will hold 800 pounds, or so Rahul said. If I get my hands on one, I will test this theory, it should hold two people and a bunny suit. Or 75 per cent of a hardcore gamer. It is hard to understate how solid this case is.

One of the nice things about being part of a huge corporation is that you can steal from the corporate parts bin. If you do right, you end up with the Blackbird, wrong and you end up with a Cadillac Cimmaron (look it up), or worse yet, you do nothing and end up with Alienware.

Voodoo did it right. It liberally stole from the parts bin, the most obvious things being the hinges and tool free fittings. Nearly everything is tool free, and it all opens with a fair bit of ease. The side door hinges back and lifts off quickly. This was swiped from the ML series of servers, and qualifies as a 'good thing'.

As soon as you open it up, the first thing you will notice is there is really little to see. All the slots are covered by hinged panels, the only visible part is the mobo around the CPU and memory. The slots and other parts are covered up completely. These covers are hinged doors that also pop off like the main door, again, tool free. You can see the card cover door open above.

You will also notice a lack of exposed 5.25-inch bays. They are mounted vertically in the chassis above the HDs, and seem to all be slot loaded. The 3.5-inch bays, five of them, are tray loaded and have a backplane. This means that you can take a HD, put it in the carrier, again tool free, and just slide it in. The hex wrench and tools above them are most likely extras for the optical drives, hence the 'almost' in the tool free part. At least they give you the one tool you will need.

A couple more tidbits on the case itself, you can see the pop-up card reader, USB, Firewire and sound pod on top. It is another pretty solid piece, not as damped as a Mercedes boot, but hardly cheap, good enough so I am not afraid it will break if I touch it wrong. The other interesting bit is almost impossible to see in pictures, and I didn't notice it for about 10 minutes with a dozen blackbirds in front of me, the case is tapered. It is about an inch wider in back than in front.

One of the most controversial styling elements in any case is LEDs. They were all the rage among the 12 year old set a while ago, and your manhood was directly proportional to the number of LEDs your case had. Agonisingly garish? Better than too few. Blackbird has LEDs, a fair number of them, but they avoided the pimp my ride trap.

Some of the LEDs on the case actually are functional, the ports in the back are lit by an LED. Others are less useful, the area between the bottom of the case and the foot is lit to give it that, err, pimp my ride look. The prototypes we saw had green LEDs, but release units are promised to have a much more tasteful blue/white hue. In any case, the best part is that they can be turned off. You read that correctly, the LEDs have an off switch so that bit that looks so cool at a lan party but drills into the back of your brain late at night can be made to go away without resorting to damaging the case with a hammer.

The case has a 1100W PSU mounted on the bottom, not the top. This is another example of how the case was designed for function over form. There are three airflow zones, corresponding to the panels above, one for the CPU/memory, one for the cards, and another for the PSU. Remember the foot? It does more than hold up 3/4s of a gamer, it also allows air to be sucked in from the bottom to cool the PSU directly.

The point of all of this is simple, the chassis is designed to cool 1100W. If the PSU can only put out 1100W, it should be impossible to overheat the chassis. Famous last words, but there was an honest effort to do the right thing or the right reasons.

Speaking of cooling, the Blackbirds I saw are water cooled, and they were running a high end system with a quad core CPU, two GPUs, and a no case fan a for the CPU. A lot of this is because the GPUs are in their own airflow compartment, and partially because of the water cooling. Either way, it bodes well.

There are fans in the system, you do need airflow, but again, they are not in the obvious places. The bottom compartment fan is not in the normal front of the case location, it is set toward the middle of the chassis. You lose a bit of efficiency here, but you more than make up for it in lack of noise. In the environment we saw the Blackbirds in, 20 or so machines all set up for gaming, it was hard to tell exactly how silent they were, but we could not hear any annoying whines.

Blackbird is not a single configuration, but more of a range of machines. Voodoo promises that there will be all sorts of configurations, starting at about $2,600 and going to $6,500 or so. These are not fixed prices, more what you can config the machine at, and will change when new parts come out. We are told there will be both Intel and AMD CPUs available as well as NV and ATI GPUs. Somehow Voodoo is going to launch an AMD 790 SKU before the chipset launch, but we are not supposed to know that. If you want a 790 early, you know where to get it.

The parts themselves are nothing special, high end, well picked, but pretty much stock. There is no Voodoo/Blackbird mobo, no GPU from hell, just carefully chosen bits. You can do a lot with matching parts, take the ASUS mobo detecting Corsair RAM and lowering timings for example. Don't expect miracles, just solid functionality.

I would fully expect that the Blackbird 003 will move a bit more in the custom part direction, but for now, this is a good place to start. Even with HP's resources, I can't see it every being worth it to go for full custom parts, but more design influence would be a good thing.

Blackbird is an anomaly at HP, it is still being built by Voodoo at the now expanded Voodoo facility. Each one is hand built, and the engineers rotate through support, so you will get someone on the phone that has a clue, not the HP customer antagonistic 'centers of cost savings'.

On the down side, the computer only comes with Vista and the attendant malware. There is no option for XP or Linux, so I will have to dock them points there. For me this is a deal breaker, for others, well, that is your call.

In the end, the Blackbird 002 looks to be a very nice custom case that is flexible enough to accept a range of standard parts. There is nothing there that can't be done in a standard case with standard parts, but the Voodoo package looks to bring all the pieces together nicely, for a price.

The development money was spent in the right places for the right reasons, as we said, Bauhaus. If you are in the market for a high end PC, it is worth taking a long look at, I think it did right. µ