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.

While the title suggests a controversial ‘PC gaming is doomed’ scenario, though, his blog makes a lot of sense. The last few months have seen plenty of economic turmoil and a huge shift in the graphics market. While the credit crunch has been hitting hard, high-end graphics just don’t seem to matter any more – as the post explains, it’s almost impossible to justify spending £400 on a new GPU unless you’re one of the tiny minority playing at an enormous resolution. Sood suggests that the days of people regularly spending thousands of new computers and hundreds on new high-end graphics cards are over. For the first time in recent memory it’s conceivable that he could be right, too.

Previously, you’d have to shell out hundreds if you wanted to play the latest games at their prettiest settings. That’s just not the case any more – £150 on an ATI Radeon HD 4870 will have you playing almost anything. I’ve got one in my machine at home and it handles Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2 at 1,680 x 1,050 with no problems. It can’t quite manage Crysis at its peak settings, but that’s about the only thing this remarkable GPU can’t handle. And those lush jungles look great on mere ‘high’ settings, anyway.

This is symptomatic of the way gaming is going – and our A List is packed full of more evidence that you just don’t need a £2,000 machine these days. The Chillblast Fusion Sidewinder costs £835 exc. VAT and comes with an HD 4870 and overclocked processor – and managed a 40fps in our high-detail Crysis benchmark. The slightly cheaper Cyberpower Gamer Infinity GT has an HD 4850 and ran the same benchmark at a playable 33fps, with the PC Specialist Apollo Q8200 GTX+, featuring an Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+, ran at 34fps. Three machines that cost well under £1,000, three systems that all include monitors that can fully take advantage of the performance of these so-called ‘mid-range’ cards.

That’s not to say that expensive machines aren’t fun and don’t have their place. My time spent in the PC Pro Labs testing, benchmarking and prodding the six machines we welcomed for the Ultimate PC Labs was hugely enjoyable, and proved that your extra cash does go towards some things that you just don’t get on mid-priced machines. The build-quality was largely impeccable, Blu-ray drives and SSD was the norm, and the complex water-cooling meant that chips ran cool despite their high clock speeds.

There’s no doubt in our minds that these monster machines – with their equally lofty prices – have a place in the future of high-performance computing. They’ll always be enthusiasts willing to shell out top dollar on outlandish and enormously powerful machines. Sood believes, though, that this market will quickly diminish.

For the majority, the ballpark is shifting. Our A List proves that huge power is available from modest machines and that a company can’t just survive on making Ultimate PCs alone – systems like that just aren’t vital to play the latest games, and the era of mainstream hardware offering polygon-destroying power seems to be well and truly upon us.

This manifesto of change brings us neatly on to the next product to emerge from VoodooPC: the innovative and slightly strange Firebird 803, which brazenly ditches many of the conventions that we hold dear in our computers – whether it’s a £500 email machine or £3,000 monster.

The design of the machine is reminiscent of a smaller Blackbird 002. Whereas that machine was bulky and somewhat bloated, the glossy exterior and cool colours suggest that this is a far more focussed system, albeit one that appears to be around half the size – at the very least – of its predecessor.

Inside, though, is where the real excitement is. The specifications are tantalising: an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz processor, 4GB of RAM, two 320GB, hot-swappable hard disks, Blu-ray and draft-n wireless. There are three GPUs – but it’s not in the heat-spewing triple-SLI arrangement that has proved so problematic in the past. Two of the graphics chips are Nvidia GeForce 9800S, low form-factor chips, whereas the third is a weaker part. The computer can switch between them when you’re gaming and when you’re not to save power.

ATX has also been abandoned for this machine – instead, the motherboard is a proprietary part that has the two main GPUs sitting flush to the surface, with water-cooling blocks atop them to keep them chilled, as well as another cooling loop on the processor. There appear to be no space for PCI Express slots of any kind – just the DIMM slots that already hold the RAM.

Of course, this system does come with inevitable caveats. Hardly any expansion potential, for instance, and the fact that this new form factor has been adopted in precisely one machine – there’s a huge amount of potential if this could become an accepted standard, but even more risk should this gamble fail. However, we’re still incredibly excited: HP claim that the Firebird 803 is incredibly quiet and uses hardly any power when compared to bulky desktop machines.

In a way, the Firebird 803 is almost akin to a console: a self-contained machine rather than the traditionally open, ATX-based machine. Whether the two graphics chips also follow the lead of consoles and can’t quite match PC performance is something that we’re eager to find out. HP is keeping mum on whether the Firebird 803 will see the light of day over here – and we’re curious as to whether this new approach will both find favour with keen PC gamers and be able to match up to the sort of performance we’re used to.

We’ll keep bugging HP to send us a Firebird 803 so we can see if it really delivers on all of its lofty promises – and to see if Rahul Sood’s prediction about the demise of the traditional high-end machine is upon us. Until then, let me know what you think: is this the end of the super-expensive gaming PC, or is HP trying to force a change that just isn’t necessary? And are you still willing to spend silly money on the latest hardware – no matter what the price?

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.

Szolyga continued working on the project in private until he took a flight with a couple of HP directors. One of them was late so, in the ensuing small talk, Szolyga enthused about his project – and he’d received funding by the time the plane landed. Development moved ahead when Rahul Sood, founder of VoodooPC, was brought in to lend his expertise to the project after HP bought his boutique manufacturer. The result was shown off in London today and, well, it’s mighty impressive.

The striking chassis, for instance, isn’t just for show. The fins all over the machine work as a giant heatsink, and the stand at the bottom doesn’t just look good, but allows for air to get at the bottom of the case, too. Two optical drives are included – DVD and Blu-ray – and mounted vertically behind a pair of doors in the slatted front, and the usual ports and sockets on the front of the PC are hidden. Push down on the top of the machine, and a neat pop-up caddy has a card reader, pair of USB ports, FireWire and headphone and microphone jacks. There’s no eSATA, though, which we have seen on cheaper machines.

Inside, the VoodooPC heritage is obvious. PSU, GPUs and CPU are kept apart with divided compartments making sure that hot air from one component won’t interfere with another, and each door or barrier snaps out easily – so getting at each part is simple. The only tool required is a small Allen key, and that’s attached to the side of the optical drive compartment.

The modular PSU sits at the bottom of the chassis, with a couple of huge fans – and the water-cooling system – at the top; cables wind their way down to the CPU and pair of graphics cards to keep them chilled.

Five hard disk bays sit towards the front of the case, and it’s incredibly simple to add a new disk: drop it into the plastic caddy and plug it back in. The SATA and power cables are mounted at the end of the bay, so it’s as easy as literally plugging the drive in. They’re hot-swappable, too, depending on how the drives are configured.

The sample we saw came with different hardware to what’ll be in the finished version – it had a pair of 8800-series graphics cards, for a start – but the official retail spec still sounds relatively tempting: an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 processor, a pair of ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics cards, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard disk with a 10,000rpm 160GB for super-quick access. We’d question the choice of graphics cards when 4870 X2 and GTX 280 cards are all the rage, but they’ll still be lightning quick.

You’ll be paying for the fantastic specification and superb design, though. The Blackbird 002 will cost £2,722 excluding VAT – and without a monitor or set of speakers. It’s a fantastic machine with a fascinating backstory, but is that enough to win us over when it costs that much? We’ve been assured by HP that we can have one for review pretty soon, so we’ll deliver our verdict as soon as we get our hands on one.