Digital Home Thoughts: HP Firebird Takes Flight

"What we’re bringing to the table is a performance PC that doesn’t suck energy, doesn’t dominate a room in terms of size, but does kick ass. The HP Firebird with Voodoo DNA strikes a balance that has never been struck before. It is deadly quiet, its innovations are truly revolutionary, and it brings energy efficiency to the performance PC space. We have effectively taken typical high performance PC hardware, shrunk it down, made it way more energy efficient, made it quieter (uhh, silent), kept it fully modular, and oh yeah, didn’t sacrifice performance or features that our customers demand. Basically, we took the gas-guzzling SUV and converted it into an energy efficient super car."

An Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, Nvidia Hybrid SLI Graphics and a water cooled system makes the HP Firebird a drool worthy computer. However, VoodooPC has worked the PC over into a slick package focused on someone who wants a reasonably powerful computer that can switch to extremely low power usage when it isn't tasked with heavy duties. While Rahul Sood doesn't give out many more specifics on the internals of this beast, much of which is custom built for the Firebird, some tidbits that caught my attention is that it draws 107 watts idle, and peaks at 233 watts. With energy prices rising, power consumption has become an obsession of mine, and 233 watts is far lower than most of my computers at home! And it is quiet at 30db too. No more whine while I plod away on spreadsheets and code. While the base model does come in at a hefty $1799, that is a fair price considering how much it would cost to build my own powerhouse. Excuse me while I go check to see if my wallet can handle the expense!