HP and Voodoo's second-gen gaming PC, Firebird, is twice as good as their last effort, the Blackbird. The Firebird is half the size of the Blackbird, less noisy (less than 30 dB at full throttle) because HP made the power supply external to cut down on the internal fans, and it draws half as much power (350 watts vs. around 700 watts).

Best of all, the two Firebird models are more than half the price of the Blackbirds. The two models, the 802 and the 803 are $1,800 and $2,100 respectively vs. $4,000-$6,000 for the Blackbird.

The 803 (pictured) is liquid-cooled, hence the weird Matrix-like tubing inside the CPU, packs in a 640 GB hard drive, an Nvidia 9800S processor, 4 GB of RAM, and a 2.83 GHz quad processor, along with 802.11a/b/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a Creative Labs X-Fi sound card, all missing from the 802 (500 GB, 2.66 GHz quad core). Both models will be available this Friday.

Also pictured is the W2558HC 25.5-inch LCD monitor ($549).