Voodoo-Designed HP Firebird 803 Is Tiny, Still Has Space for Too Many Lights

I loved Voodoo Omen’s steely, austere looks, so the design of HP’s pint-sized Firebird 803 gaming tower with VoodooDNA is kind of disappointing. Oddly, it reminds me of Linkin Park.

The shrink ray they blasted the Blackbird 02 with works much of its magic by dumping the power supply outside of the system and killing expandability, kind of like a game console—very PC gamer un-friendly. But the specs, as Engadget has ‘em, are fairly respectable, the somewhat piddly GeForce 9800S cards aside. (Why no GeForce 9800 GTs?)

* NVIDIA nForce 760i SLI chipset
* Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz processor
* 4GB of RAM
* Dual NVIDIA GeForce 9800S cards
* Two 320GB SATA drives
* Blu-ray
* 5-in-1 card reader
* 6 USB, 1 FireWire, 2 eSATA, 1 S/PDIF and 1 DVI dual-link
* Bluetooth
* 802.11n WiFi

Obviously, we’ll reserve full judgments until we get our hands on it (likely at CES), but given all the compromises needed to get that firefly form factor, we’re not holding our Crysis-coated breath. [Engadget]