HP today reached out to the gaming crowd with a new top-end version of its Blackbird 002 gaming PC, now featuring a 45nm Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 quad-core processor running at 3.0GHz. Dubbed the Alpha configuration, this beast packs a pair of 1GB ATI Radeon X2900 XT?s running in Crossfire mode, 2GB of Corsair?s DDR2 SLI-Ready RAM, and a 160GB 10,000 RPM hard drive.

Other features include a 16? combo drive and a 16? DVD?RW drive, an Ageia PhysX 100 Series PCI-E accelerator card, a factory-sealed liquid-cooled CPU, a 15-in-1 memory card reader, and the Blackbird?s characteristic ASUS Maximus Formula mainboard that supports both ATI?s CrossFire and Nvidia?s SLI for multi-GPU configurations. The Blackbird 002 Alpha is available today for the obscene price of $5,499.