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HP Blackbird 002 Benchmarked

@ 2007/09/12

Not everything is strictly standard design, however. The motherboard might be an ASUS Striker with an NVIDIA 680i chipset, but it does appear to have a customized BIOS. Besides the HP logo when the system boots up, there appears to have been some behind the scenes work in order to enable peer-to-peer writes on the PCI-E bus. Why is that important? Well, ATI CrossFire requires peer-to-peer writes in order to function, and ATI has always maintained that support for this feature is the only thing preventing CrossFire from working on other chipsets, like NVIDIA's SLI chipsets. Whether the work was done by ASUS, NVIDIA, HP, and/or AMD, the fact of the matter is that CrossFire and SLI both work on this motherboard. The version we were shipped includes two HD 2900 XT cards running in CrossFire as proof of this fact. That means that regardless of who takes the graphics performance crown in the future, users will have the ability to upgrade to the latest CrossFire or SLI configuration.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/09/12

I like stability over speed, rather have excel load .5 second slower, than having your machine crash while working on it.

Comment from Sidney @ 2007/09/12

Okay, for $6500 you get a very fast system 99.9% stable from HP; we all can laugh at Intel for giving us the freebies on overclocking, for HP and Dell to do the same won't cut it. Because, anything less than 100% stable is unacceptable. I can't imagine OEM overclocked system will increase sales. I would be similar to selling a fast car to be used on State and Federal highway that is less safe than Government mendated.

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