High-end gaming machines seem to always cost more than they should and the recently announced HP Blackbird was no exception. Blackbird being the first joint collaboration between HP and Voodoo PC since HP bought Voodoo expectations are high for the system.

One thing you can say for the Blackbird 002 is that the case looks very nice. Otherwise the system is aimed at users with enough technical know-how to want a machine they can upgrade down the road. This is also the point at which HP loses me a bit because it seems to me that a buyer with enough technical ability to upgrade a machine could just roll their own for much less than the asking price of up to $7100 HP demands. However, there will always be some with pockets deep enough to want a turn key product.

One little detail that has emerged about the Blackbird 002 that is notable was uncovered by CustomPC in an interview with Raul Sood from Voodoo PC. Custom PC reported that the Blackbird 002 was compatible with both NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFire multiple graphics card solutions. You can’t currently buy a mainboard over the counter than will run both SLI and Crossfire so DailyTech decided to verify this notable fact.

DailyTech contacted Raul Sood and he had this to say about the Blackbird 002’s SLI and CrossFire capability, “It's not a licensing thing...  We don’t need to license Crossfire from AMD. Let's just say we figured it out, and we're making it work. On Blackbird you can download ANY Catalyst driver and Crossfire will work. This is our customer promise, user agnostic upgrades.” When DailyTech asked Sood what mainboard the system uses he replied, “It's a standard Asus STRIKER motherboard.”

So there you have it, the first commercially available platform for PC that will run both NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFire. Makes you wonder how happy NVIDIA will be about that.