CES 2009 : HP Firebird - small and powerful?

[HEXUS]

HP are getting smaller with the Firebird, a small-ish desktop system built using a touch of Voodoo DNA.

Watch the show.

[Biscuit]

wow that sounds really impressive!

[Vadim]

very interesting indeed and Tarinder asked the right questions all along. Although still not clear as to the upgrade path for graphics cards...

[Azza]

Impressive and interesting at the same time.

Graphics would probabilly be the hardest thing to upgrade everything else seems to be simple. Seen as they worked with Nvidia to make the small form factor graphics specifically for that system then its not very likley they going to make them specifically for the user to buy from a store is it.... and they only have that 9800 S on their site at the mo'.

Neither the less it looks very impressive.

[Vulcanite]

It's an interesting concept and certainally follows on from Rahul Sood's marketing excercise on his blog

"Did you say high performance and lower power?"

Something occured to me whilst watching the video - if you look at the specification of the 9800S GPU it isn't even as powerful as the best mobile cards found in gaming laptops. So what HP are actually selling is something less powerful than an SLI gaming laptop, in a larger box, with no built in screen, that uses more power and with an external PSU (350W must be a reasonable size but we didn't see it in the video). Also if you do the maths now it looks like the base spec will be the equivilent of over £1,500 - for that you could get a Core i7 desktop system with a 260 GPU which will be more powerful Ok it would pull more power and HP can market it as that (only compared to current desktops, not laptops mind) but I don't see how they can call it "powerful" with those GPUs. Maybe I missed the point though?