I might not be recovered yet from my whirlwind trip out to Vegas for CES—let me save my excitement at the airport story for another time—but I’m still flying high about all of the coverage and hubbub around the HP Firebird.
I truly felt before we launched this product that it was a PC for our time, but I honestly didn’t anticipate the overwhelmingly positive response that it’s received. Besides the thousands of people who checked it out at our booth, the HP Firebird with Voodoo DNA was a finalist for the CNET Best of CES Award, which is pretty killer.
It also was the focus of dozens of articles and blogs, which call the HP Firebird everything from looking hot (stuff.tv) and style-forward (pcmag.com) to being The Strong, Silent Type (popsci.com) and luxury in an energy-efficient design (slashgear.com).
The journalists seemed personally stoked about it, too: one journalist said he walked away very, very impressed (crunchgear.com), another said he can’t wait (desktoppreview.com) to get his hands on one and another said we have a winner on our hands (gadgetell.com).
One of my favourite quotes: “It’s a PC for those who want high-performance, but not at the cost of having a Harley Davidson in the PC Case” (ubergizmo.com).
So cool to see all of this after such a long time of grueling development work.
One of the big highlights for me was a Tweetup that we held, where a bunch of bloggers converged on the booth to talk all things Firebird.
It was a good, good time. It was also great to talk to partners and even some competitors at CES about the future of the PC. Check out more about this on my blog.
Overall, we’re so happy with the response and can’t wait to get these machines into people’s hands.
So, the news has been out for over a week. What do you think?
8 blogger comments:
Uh ... any gaming performance benchmarks compared to the competitors? My guess is the Firebird won't do very well.
Falcon, with all due respect, one can build a car made of parts from the lowest bidding company in China and destroy a Ferrari F430 in a drag race.
In a Formula 1 race that same car would get destroyed.
If all you're talking about is FPS then perhaps Firebird won't be the fastest. ..but I stand by what I said before. There is no other PC that has balanced the following key features other than Firebird;
- Size, it's smaller than other high performance PCs on the market.
- Quiet, there is no quieter high performance PC - anywhere.
- Power - Firebird uses a fraction of the power of any high performance PC - any SLI system - anywhere. Try fitting all of this under max load while consuming around 233 watts. It's amazing.
- Scalability, While still small and unique, Firebird is also scalable. It features multiple ports in the back including an express card slot. It has built in WIFI, a creative Labs XFI, there's really nothing lacking in the system.
- ID, the ID on Firebird is amazing. It opens up tool-free, the hard drives are swappable without tools, and it has the cleanest layout inside compared to any high performance PC - anywhere.
- External Power Supply, we believe the external power supply is a must have on such a system. If in the event of a power failure you need not worry about re-cabling the entire machine..
- Value, you get all of this, Hybrid SLI, quad core processor, 640 gigs storage, liquid cooling, size/power consumption/etc, creative labs xfi, blue ray, wifi, wireless keyboard/mouse, 25.5" HDMI display, two 9800S cards, 4 gigs memory, etc - for $2648.
I could keep going, but you probably get the point.
i find it very innovative, the use of the small form factor cards (mobile) in a deskstop...i always like the ideas voodoo brings to the table, like crossfire running on a nForce SLI chipset on blackbird 002...very clean LCS by Asetek...
in the future Hp or voodoo should consider AMD more...
I personally would of like to see a firebird configured with a phenom II, hybrid crossfire motherboard, and 2 mobile 4830 or 4850...Nvidia can't match ATI at high resolution and high antiliasing settings(8xAA)...
with that said...firebird is going to do good on 1280x1024 and
1680x1050, but at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 with high quality XAA settings is going to suffer a big performance hit...my guess...
best of luck and keep innovation forward like always...
On the whole I think the idea of the Firebird is brilliant and I do like the case design.
I am however interested in the thinking behind some of the hardware choices, as they do seem a little strange for something that's aimed at power users/gamers. For example...
Why the use of 5400 rpm drives? I understand that laptop drives were used to save space but why not use at least 7200 rpm versions?
What was the reasoning behind sticking with Core 2 over the Core i7? Timing, heat generation, power consumption?
Lastly, having used nVidia's MXM interface with the graphics chips is this something that can be easily upgraded later by the customer? Are HP/Voodoo planning on releasing updated graphics boards for the Firebird in the future or are you pretty much stuck with the 9800s?
Hopefully some of the usual review sites will be putting the Firebird through its paces in weeks to come. I would be most interested to see how it performs as concrete information is a little sketchy at the moment. As it is, if it lives up to some of the promise I could definitely see myself retiring the hulking box I have sitting beside my desk at the moment...assuming of course this is sold internationally :-)
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Hey Rahul, I'm very close to buying a Firebird 002, but I'm wondering, how does it stack up in games like WoW? Since it's a fairly new product, not many people have gotten around (By all means, if you have found a place that is doing a comprehensive analysis of in-game performance, I'll be sure to check it out) to putting it to the test and posting FPS results in various games. I'm not much of a techie, and this seems like a pretty good investment.
Does it play WoW? This thing will crush WoW in its sleep.. Yes, it plays WoW hard.
I just bought it over the weekend, didn't even think long about it. But, now I'm wondering, will I ever be able to upgrade the graphics cards in a few years?
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