OK, here are some pictures of the unboxing and my impressions of both this particular unit, as well as any differences between this unit and the standard Blackbird002 I have now.
Surprise, surprise, it's huge. This was as far as the UPS guys made it.
Neat and ironic. Nice job with the customized security tape from Voodoo, but it was broken when it arrived...
Are they unboxing it or stealing something? Who knows, but seriously I'd suggest having a friend to help. Getting this thing up two flights of stairs and out of the box solo was an effort. And probably not something I'd recommend.
The outer box is just protection for the matte black containers inside. Big box has the CPU, little one has the accessories.
On the top of the accessories box is a file folder containing the documentation and a standard black mousepad. Both of these are identical to the Blackbird002, which was a little disappointing.
Here are the EE overlays for the side panels. They certainly don't look bad but I'm still on the fence about using them. The standard back ones look so classy, these are much more colorful. Don't know how I feel about that yet.
Hmmm... Booklet detailing some of the additional skins. A couple of them are very nice, and since there's one with Darth Vader on it, I'm sure there will be others from the SW series. We seriously need the option to by blank panels. Soon.
The rest of the accessories. From the top left moving clockwise, an Orange Box, a 30-day Microsoft Gold card, 3-way SLI bridge, power cable and velcro ties, adapters for power connections, DVI-to-VGA adapters, Windows Media, a nice USB drive (2Gb) with some product videos on it, and a black CD/DVD that I haven't explored yet. This is all exactly the same as the Blackbird002, which again disappoints me, which I'm not sure is fair, but...
Did I mention it's big? My son turns two in August, for the sake of scale...
Nice packaging, modular, comes apart easy, but protects well. Good shot of the design on the side.
And here's the money shot. Note all of the static wrap to keep the high-gloss plastic clean and scratch-free.
Yummy. They just look mean. The SLI bridge does seem much lower (closer to the motherboard) than with the GTX 8800 Ultras. I can see where a PCI card in-between could be an issue. I'll try a couple that I have around the house and let you know what fits.
Cables are very clean, routing is smart and unobtrusive. The power supply with no hard-wired cables is probably a must to keep the cables this clean, since they can all be custom sized.
eSATA port (which the Blackbird002 lacked), 6 USB, firewire, 2 Gig NICs, optical audio out. Pretty standard, but nice. I've seen some press shots of this panel that have an LCD on it that provides the POST information. Neither this one nor the Blackbird002 has that, so I'm not sure if it's a reference board or what.
There you go. I'm going to spend the rest of the night cleaning up, cabling (I am one of THOSE guys when it comes to cable management) and getting drives updated. I'll run some benchmarks on it and post my impressions of the system itself later on. Overall, it's a solid machine, just not a "special" as I thought it would be. It certainly doesn't appear that any effort was made to differentiate it from the standard Blackbird002 other than the skins. It would have been nice to get some custom themes, maybe have the USB drive come with the EE color scheme, I don't know. I guess it's not important in the big picture, but for some reason I expected this to be a step above the regular/retail model.
I'm off to play. :-)
Bioender
Holy crap, this thing is fast. I don't know if it's the x64 Vista, or just the clean image, but this damn thing smokes.
First things first, I stepped the processor one additional multiplier, so I'm running at 4Ghz with no problems. I also enabled the EPP feature of the memory to step up the clock speed there. No stability issues, CPU is running at 65C with no issues. As long as the chip holds up, it looks like there is a good bit of room to spare in the chassis setup with the liquid cooling.
I took a picture (below) of the SLI bridge and the sound card so everyone can see the issue there. You can easily see where the bridge is bowed. Hopefully the flex bridges will be out soon, but I haven't noticed any issues (yet).
Can someone else (dramsey?) launch the HPSysInfo app and tell me what it says for Serial#? I don't think that's pulling valid data, but I want to check...
OK. Time to get some file transfers queued up from the NAS and get to bed. I love this computer. :-)
Bioender
