I should stop neglecting my blogs..

Greetings,

I just wanted to drop in an update after almost a year of using the Blackbird 002 in my home. I still love this system, even though the components are becoming a little dated, the system is still slugging away at any games I have loaded.

Most recently I have been playing Age of Conan, and I am still looking forward to Stargate Worlds, and Startrek Online.

For anyone who has purchased a blackbird in the last year, I hope your experience has been as positive as mine.

Best Wishes,
Casey

So I'm pretty Daft

With the hustle and bustle of the Holidays, I completely blew off sending the pre-production blackbird back to HP. It was packed and ready to go, I just didn't do it. It took a message from Chris Sutton at Voodoo to remind me. So thanks Chris and Voodoo-PC team for being patient, I will drop it by the UPS Station on my way into work on Monday.

Casey

Hellgate London DX10 Gameplay Footage

Greetings Folks,

As soon as the file finishes uploading I will have some footage of Hellgate London running in DX10 on my Blackbird.

Casey:

Some New 3DMark06 Score Results - A Wee Bit O' Tweking

So here are my new 3DMark06 Scores after tweaking a few settings with in the the bios, the tweaks were CPU only, but I will look into working on the RAM timings later.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=4412749

Cannis

A Very Merry Belated Christmas To You All:

A combination of work and the Holidays has kept me busy the past few days, but I wanted to jump back on here and post a link to the Blackbird Desktop images and the Blackbird Vista Theme.

Link: Blackbird Desktop Images & Theme

Merry Christmas,
Casey

Blackbird Desktop Images and Vista Themes

I know I promised to put these images up, but I just realized that I don't have server space that isn't mission critical on which to host them. I will see what I can do about putting up a private web space to host this stuff on. Besides I am sure I can find other uses for it as well.

Please bear with me...

Casey

Sooo,,,,,,

It is now week three with my new Blackbird DE, and I am quite satisfied with the system. Although I am a little puzzled by HP's lack of follow up on 'The Orange Box' question. I've asked about the shipping date for the software, but I haven't heard anything back from the support team.

On another note, I still have two Blackbirds, the other one has yet to be shipped back. Still waiting on shipping labels.

Casey

Oh Noze .. He Posted!!

My apologies for not posting any content sooner, but I have been a busy little beaver these past couple of weeks. We are in the middle of a bit network roll out here at work so everything has been focused on making sure it all works like its supposed to.

The Blackbird is doing well, but I haven't purchased any new games recently. It has been doing a stand up job of network monitoring. ;)

Cannis

3DMark06 Scores (No Pics, It didn't Happen)

I ran a 3 test series on the new blackbird and came up with an average performance of 16,440. Which is a small gain over the air cooled 8800's in the pre-production system.

/Casey Annis

New HP Blackbird 002 Dedication Edition Has Arrived

I wanted to post an update!

The replacement unit for the pre-production model of the Blackbird has made it to my front door. This system is very sleek and has some refinements that the other unit was lacking. The paint job is more polished, and the LED accent lighting is much nicer and much much brighter than on the pre-prod model.

This new unit is lacking the Aegia PhysX card, and the Blu-Ray Re-Writer/HD-DVD Drive, but I was being very optimistic when I was hoping for these additions in the replacement unit. The Blu-Ray drive is a $393.00 upgrade from the base price and the almost $200.00 for the Aegia PhysX card. I didn't expect HP to toss them in the deal..

After I get a chance to get the drives configured again, I will run the new 3DMark 06 tests to see if the scores have changed any.

Regards,
/Casey