Voodoo makes Crossfire work on SLI

THERE'S PLENTY of news about HP's new Voodoo-inspired gaming machine, the Blackbird. Indeed, our own Charlie pondered its existence just yesterday. However, he missed one thing - the fact that the Blackbird runs Crossfire on an Nvidia chipset motherboard.

The folks at Custard PC magazine spoke to HP's Gaming CTO, Rahul Sood, who told them: "What's really cool is that we're only using the Nforce chipset for Intel, because it's the best chipset, but we're also giving the choice of Crossfire or SLI on it."

Interesting stuff. Voodoo claims that this secret sauce is part of HP's move to be 'component agnostic' - delivering the gaming experience to customers without necessarily caring about the components that do it.

You can read the full interview with Rahul here, where the man makes some rather unflattering comparisons to Dell's XPS line of machines. Has anyone at HP ever been this interesting to talk to?

We are waiting for the speculation and the controversy to begin. How long before we start seeing more vendors breaking ranks and kicking Nvidia, Intel and ATI around in a bid to make everything work together? The SLI/CrossFire lock is entirely artificial, as one X16 slot is just like any other. Kudos to HP to calling the bluff of the graphics vendors. µ