HP FireBird (VoodooDNA 803) review: HP FireBird (VoodooDNA 803)

As you can see from our performance charts, the Firebird 803 is a completely capable desktop. It sits exactly where it should compared to other PCs in its price class, outperforming the less expensive Dell, and falling behind the Acer, Maingear, and Velocity Micro systems that all cost more. The multitasking test puts the Firebird behind its competition most dramatically, but considering that those systems are aggressively overclocked, the Firebird 803 has nothing to apologize for. We were afraid the 5,400rpm laptop hard drives might adversely affect its performance, but instead this system will handle every mainstream application you throw at it.

Our gaming tests do a better job of showing the Firebird's limitations. On even our high-resolution Unreal Tournament 3 test, the Firebird scored well above 100 frames per second. This indicates that for most current and near-future generation gaming titles, you should expect playable performance with decent image quality. For more demanding games, particularly more recent first-person shooters, you may have to compromise on the image quality, especially at high resolutions. We're not surprised this system had difficulty on our Crysis benchmark, and the Far Cry 2 test is probably more indicative of higher-end titles, even if it is more forgiving. On that game you can see that the Firebird came in right under 50 frames per second on our 1,440x900 test, so if you have a 19-inch LCD or smaller, you're in luck. Go up to a 24-inch display at 1,920x1,200 and things get choppier. Dropping the anti-aliasing, the overall image quality, or both, will usually improve the situation, but we'd expect better gameplay in general at lower resolutions.

Hard-core PC gamers will likely scoff at the idea of sacrificing frame rates for power efficiency, but given the general capabilities of the Firebird 803, its power consumption compared with other gaming PCs in its price class is nothing short of amazing. Whether the system is powered on but idle, or struggling to get through our Crysis benchmark, its power consumption was almost half that of the Dell XPS 625, and more than three times less than Maingear's most recent X-Cube desktop (the Velocity Micro and Acer systems both went back to their respective vendors before we could test them). If you swap this system in for a traditional upper-mainstream gaming rig, we expect you'd see a noticeable drop in your annual electric bill. And as added bonus, in addition to its great power efficiency, the Firebird is also whisper quiet.

We went over the internal expansion limitations earlier, but you actually get a minor reprieve in that regard by way of an Express Card slot on the back of the Firebird. Again relying on laptop standards, by providing an Express Card slot, HP opens the door to adding a TV tuner, a sound card, or other extras not included in the system's core configuration. For the ports next to the card slot, highlights include an HDMI out, two eSATA ports, an optical S/PDIF output, and six USB 2.0 jacks. Of some concern is the single stereo audio output. If you have digital speakers, a digital receiver, or you intend to run the audio out from the HDMI port, you're fine for surround sound, but analog 5.1 or 7.1 speaker owners are out of