Mid-life Crysis: HP Blackbird 002 "Exhilaration Edition"
Yesterday, HP squeezed a little marketing blood out of blogs — clearly the turnips of the online media world — as they announced an update to their flagship gaming PC, the HP Blackbird 002 "Exhilaration Edition". It's chock-a-block with the latest PC hardware, including a pair of Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 280 cards, the latest and greatest 3D graphics hardware. Prices for the Blackbird 002 start at $6,600.
Over six-thousand dollars.
There must be a certain segment of the market who has the disposable income to spend thousands on a new gaming PC every six months or so. These are the outliers, the rich geeks who still have time to game, or at least remember what it was like to be a young buck with a shit-hot Voodoo 2 card. For them, these sort of PCs are the convertible Corvettes of the PC hardware world.
But how many rich gamers are actually out there? Enough for this to be a profitable product for HP?
Or are these sort of computers like sports cars for their manufacturers, too? High-end mules for the latest widgets that park themselves in buyers' minds when they go out and buy the economy model? That has to be it. I can't understand any PC gamer worth their salt who would spend this sort of money on a PC they could build themselves — or have built for them — in six months time for half the cost. Or less.
HP BlackBird 002 Exhilaration Edition with GeForce GTX 280 [Ubergizmo]
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Another possibility: This is a prestige product, and hp is looking for a halo effect.
It's pretty easy to push a Mac Pro build to order well over $20,000. That's before adding dual 30" monitors or any bundled software. Granted over half of it would be on overpriced RAM and hard drives.
I just assembled a sweet gaming PC. I'm back on the TF2 bandwagon now. Anybody know what happened to that BoingBoing TF2 server? It was a good one...
Gainclone: me too.
I'm so thrilled, I put together a 780G motherboard, 4850e cpu and 2gb of ram for $230 - and I can play TF2 using the onboard video, and the cpu is enough faster than my athlon xp 2400 that I don't always have to play medic!
um, yeah... expensive hp. I bet they buy machines like that for the software developers at game companies, and that's how you end up with games that require a $500 video card.
When the NVIDIA G80 came out, our scientific computing research group had to get an expensive gaming rig just to have a big enough case and power supply to handle it. But nowadays the NVIDIA boards seem to be more reasonably sized, from what I've heard.
The fellow who develops on that machine also claims to use it off-hours for "research on human-computer interaction in networked graphics-intensive consumer applications," or so he says ;-)
...This still doesn't make me feel guilty about being an Unreal Tournament player.
what are you talking about?
there are shitloads of rich gamers out there!
they are the largest consumer of top graphics/acceleration cards and novelty game-themed (aka crap) hardware and perpherals out there.
there are rich people in the world right? and people play games? venn diagram, anyone?
what are you talking about?
there are shitloads of rich gamers out there!
they are the largest consumer of top graphics/acceleration cards and novelty game-themed (aka crap) hardware and perpherals out there.
i paid $8000 for my first mac setup. high grade gaming pcs going for $6600 is cheap!
there are rich people in the world right? and people play games? venn diagram, anyone?
I was one of those geeks who bought an overpriced gaming pc, but it wasn't terribly overpriced at about 3 grand on an Alienware Area 51. You can spend that much on a tricked out Dell, HP, or whatever. I could have gotten someone to build me something like it, I guess, but I didn't know who to go to, nor did I feel I had the expertise to do it myself. Anyway, since then, I've become proficient with adding cards, etc, and upgrading it myself.
I hate it when people claim you can build the same machine for less money, or go to another company and have them do it for less, so I went out and actually researched the issue. I visited 4 other configure-and-buy sites, rate tops for seller ratings, configuring the same hardware as the Blackbird and found the prices differed by a mere $150 one way or the other. Purchasing all the same parts separately and assembling it myself would net a savings of $1200, but that doesn't figure in the headache of no warranty, no tech support, and no design elements like the Blackbird's case, for example, which can't be purchased separately.
It all comes down to what you think is worth it. If you want the bleeding edge, you're gonna have to pay for it, whether you assemble it or buy it from someone else.