HP Blackbird 002: Back in Black

Benchmark Setup

Because of a shipping snafu, we have only had the Blackbird 002 in our possession for less than a week. During that time we have been running benchmarks almost constantly, and when we weren't benchmarking the system we were running stress tests in order to push the setup to its limits. Stress testing was provided courtesy of Folding@Home SMP as well as various games. Since Friday, we have experienced exactly one crash, potentially related to Folding@Home. However, that occurred during the night and the system hard locked, plus we have been unable to duplicate the crash. We can't say that the system is 100% stable, but considering we're testing in a non-air-conditioned environment that has ranged from around 21°C at night up to as high as 33°C during the day, and adding in the fact that we have been pushing the system to its limits, we're okay with stating that this is about as stable as any other top-end system running Windows Vista.

We haven't done any recent desktop reviews, and the benchmarking landscape has changed quite a bit in the past few months making most of our old results useless in terms of direct comparisons. We also haven't tested any other systems anywhere near this fast, other than a Dell XPS 720 H2C that we had to send back due to some issues we encountered with the early prototype. Basically, we had one of the first 720 H2C systems to come off the production line, and it was overclocked to 3.73 GHz. Unfortunately, we encountered instability with the test system and so the only benchmarks we were able to complete were done at a reduced 3.47 GHz.

We're going to go ahead and include the 720 H2C results at 3.47 GHz for comparison where applicable, because that system has a lot of similarities to the HP Blackbird 002. Both are water cooled, both weigh about 70 pounds, both are factory overclocked, and both cost a small fortune. The XPS 720 H2C that we tested included dual Raptor hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration, 4GB of DDR2-800 memory, and GeForce 8800 Ultra SLI for the graphics subsystem, all in a Dell specific 680i motherboard. We would assume that Dell has since addressed any stability concerns, and we may yet provide a review of the XPS 720 H2C, but for many of the benchmarks we're going to be limited by the GPU configuration anyway which will make this comparison all the more interesting. Because the XPS was tested two months back with what are now outdated drivers, and because we have changed versions and benchmarks, preliminary results from the XPS 720 H2C will only be available in about half of the gaming tests.

Of course, testing the Blackbird 002 wasn't without issues either. Besides the crash that we experienced (note that the XPS 720 H2C we had would BSOD within minutes of starting up Folding@Home SMP), we were completely unable to get any of the Futuremark test suites to run. With the limited amount of time that we've had we decided to simply skip those results. Update: The issue with Futuremark is related to the hardware detection mechanism and ATI 2x00 series cards. We will have Futuremark results in our follow-up article. The results in F.E.A.R. were also all over the map, for example scoring 167 FPS one run and 23 FPS a second run - all at the same settings, run consecutively, without restarting. Again, this appears to be a driver/ATI problem, and we will look into this more over the next week. Once we're finished with this initial look at the Blackbird, we will also see about doing a clean install of Windows Vista in order to run additional benchmarks like SYSmark 2007.

Besides the stock performance of the Blackbird 002, we thought we'd go ahead and take a second look at the system performance with a "lesser CPU". We decided to underclock the QX6850 from the 3.67 overclock, but since we're still talking about an $1100+ processor we didn't think it would be particularly useful to look at a stock QX6850. Instead, we dropped the multiplier all the way down to seven, resulting in a hypothetical Q6650 (Core 2 Quad 2.33GHz 7x333 1333FSB). We tried to configure the CPU as an actual Q6600, but the motherboard refused to POST at an FSB setting below 1166. For whatever reason, the current BIOS doesn't like running 1333FSB processors at lower bus speeds. The primary goal here is to show exactly what users get by upgrading from the cheapest Core 2 Quad processor to the highly overclocked version that comes in the top-end model of the Blackbird.

We'll start with a few general performance applications from our multimedia benchmarking suite, but the focus is going to be on gaming performance. Simply put, if you don't care about gaming performance, we find it hard to believe that anyone would seriously consider spending over $1200 on their graphics subsystem. Sure, certain 3D graphics professionals have OpenGL cards that can cost twice as much for a single card, but that's an entirely different market. If all you need is a factory overclocked quad-core CPU, you might be able to get the Blackbird without all the extra graphics hardware, but we will have to wait a few more days before we know the answer to that question.