IDF: HP Blackbird 002 - up close and personal

Posted at: 1:51am 20th September 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

Asetek shows us the insides of HP's striking new PC

Never a man of modesty, HP's Rahul Sood recently told us that the new HP Blackbird 002 'kicked the living crap' out of the Dell XPS,' and while we haven't had a chance to put his bold claim to the test yet, we have at last managed to have a look at the machine in question.

HP's new baby was being displayed in the Asetek booth at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), as Asetek co-designed the water-cooling system used in the Blackbird. First impressions are that it's a well-built, solid piece of kit, and it looks awesome too. The machine on display was based on a Core 2 Extreme QX6850, which Asetek had clocked at 3.33GHz, although it had apparently had it successfully clocked at 3.66GHz too.

Asetek guarantees that the Blackbird's cooling system has a lifetime of 50,000 hours, and has been tested to be 100 per cent leakage free using helium. The machine on display only had the CPU attached to the water-cooling system, but you can see from the photos that the radiator has tubes to connect to two graphics cards as well.

Anyway, we managed to snap quite a few shots of the Blackbird 002 and the cooling system, so have a look through the photos below.