HP’s new Firebird 803: a revolution waiting to happen?

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Rahul Sood is an influential man: he’s the founder of boutique system-builder VoodooPC and now head of HP’s Global Gaming business. So when he posts a couple of blogs about how the gaming PC as we know it is history – an initial rant and then a follow-up answering the deluge of comments and clarifying some of his original points – you know that he means business.

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First Look: HP Blackbird 002

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

When a system arrives in the PC Pro Labs, we don’t often hear rambling tales about its birth and development – instead, the machine arrives in the back of a large van in a big box and normally leaves the same way. It was refreshing, then, to hear about the protracted development of the Blackbird 002 – the new high-end gaming system from HP.

The Blackbird began life as the brainchild of an HP engineer by the name of Tom Szolyga. A games enthusiast stifled in the more sedate entertainment division after the comparative failure of a range of Compaq gaming machines, he began work on the Blackbird, keeping it in a box under his desk – in much the same way that Google engineers can work on their own products 20% of the time.

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