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HP Firebird 803 turns up early

by on24 December 2008

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Another amazing Voodoo design

Expected to be revealed at CES next month, the HP Firebird 803 has already been outed in all its glory and we're much more impressed with what the ex-Voodoo team at HP has managed to come up with this time around compared to the Blackbird 002.

Although at first glance, the Firebird 803 looks similar to the Blackbird 002, it's much more compact, thanks to a lot of custom hardware. It uses a vertically mounted slot-loaded Blu-ray drive and you can't fit any other optical drives inside the system due to its size.

HP has also made a custom motherboard based on Nvidia's nForce 760i SLI chipset; and judging from the pictures, the system has two MXM graphics cards which, according to the spec list, consist of Geforce 9800S cards which we're not familiar with.

The CPU will be a Core 2 Quad Q9550 clocked at 2.83GHz and it, along with the chipset and the two graphics cards, is cooled by a custom watercooling kit which looks like might come from Asetek. On top of this, the Firebird 803 is expected to ship with 4GB of RAM and it looks like it'll be using SO-DIMM's and a pair of 320GB 2.5in SATA drives.

Other features include onboard 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, an ExpressCard 54 slot, a multi-format card reader, six USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire port, two eSATA connectors, a dual-link DVI port, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, optical S/PDIF out and a pair of analog audio jacks. Amazingly, this beast of a system has an external power supply which looks similar to that used on some HP/Voodoo notebooks and we'd imagine this will be a very quiet gaming system. Finally, the Firebird 803 is set to ship with a wireless keyboard and mouse.

We have no idea how much the Firebird 803 will cost, but one thing is for sure, it'll be expensive and we can't imagine that HP will sell too many of these systems. More details should be revealed at CES early next month.

You can find some more details and lots of pictures over at Engadget

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Last modified on 25 December 2008
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