Customer Ratings & Reviews

This PC is unique in many ways. To open it, its just a push of a button. Inside is very clean and organized. Another nice feature is that it is very quit. The power supply is a power brick and not an internal power supply. The LEDs are a nice feature and you can change the coloring to your mood. The PC is also very powerful. I was able to run Crysis (pc game), and Sony Vegas Pro without an issue. The bad....well my DVD-rom drive crapped out on me. It would not accept any discs as if something was jammed. If you want to upgrade parts of the PC, well you cant because if i remember correctly, it uses laptop parts. Great PC.

This is an amazing computer. One of the most impressive qualities is how quiet it is (about 25 dB). It looks so sharp that I sit it on top of my desk and can barely hear the two fans used for cooling. Of course, if it didn't perform well, who cares how quiet or good looking it is? Well, it is certainly above par here as well. I am an adult--but an adult that loves to play PC games. Here is what I can promise: it can play any game on the market currently. On some titles (read Crysis) you can't run it max everything...but this is the exception rather than the rule. I have found (and benchmarked) that this machine can run Far Cry 2, Dawn of War 2, World In Conflict, World of Warcraft, Company of Heroes, and F.E.A.R. at "High" settings with nary a stutter in gameplay. When I benchmarked 3DMark06 at stock speeds I garnered a score of 12,626. More than respectable. The fit and finish is really...it was completely unexpected. The liquid cooling modules are chromed out with a neat Voodoo logo and black loom. You can see ZERO cables when you open up the system--just the liquid cooling unit and the nice Kingston Hyper-X memory with blue heat spreaders. Everything is machined to the T, I was even impressed by the ports on the back, how snugly and perfectly they fit with the openings. All of the little things...very very impressive. As far as expandability. Lets be realistic here. You can upgrade the memory to 8 GB if you wish. You can upgrade the HD's to whatever capacity and whatever type (SSD etc.) you would like. You can even upgrade the processor to any Quad Core that has a 1333 Mhz FSB. It has an expresscard slot for a TV tuner or whatever else you'd like to add with it. It has 6 USB 2.0 ports for accessories. It has a card reader built in. It has two eSATA ports for speedy external hard drives. Optical out for digital 7.1 sound. Firewire=check. The graphics cards are probably not upgradeable. They CAN be removed from the motherboard so there is a SLIGHT chance this could change but unlikely. With the performance this PC brings to the table, you'll want a new PC before performance likely becomes a concern. And at this price point?! It is an absolute steal.

For those of you unfamiliar with the history of this PC, it was first introduced in Jan 2009 at $1800. At that price, I would say the PC is overpriced. Then it was dropped to $1300 a few months later. At this price, I would say the PC is priced just right. Now... Best Buy has it for only $1000!! This is truly a great value, and although the PC is limited in it's ability and features, it's hard to find this much bang-for-your-buck anywhere. So, you can tell from the pictures that this PC is truly unique and quite beautiful actually. Some don't care about that, but I do. It's a great addition to the living room. This computer is also very quiet and energy friendly. It's able to use a smaller power supply because it uses laptop parts and also because it's external, thereby staying cooler. It stays pretty cool inside the PC as well too- you'll never have issues with overheating. You should be able to play most games on the highest frame rates. I haven't had any issues with that yet, but I also don't have any of the super sophisticated games. Obviously you can buy much more powerful machines, but the performance-to-cost ratio can't be beat. This is still a fast computer. I made a few tweaks right away when I got this computer. First and foremost. I got rid of Vista and installed Windows 7 RC (alongside Ubuntu). Secondly, I was not happy that my "desktop" computer had 5400 RPM laptop hard drives in it. I swapped those out for normal 7200 RPM HDDs. This computer would be ultra-ultra energy efficient and quiet if it used solid state drives... perhaps HP can include that in the next model. Take Note: You will (probably) not ever be able to upgrade the graphics cards. They are based on some weird NVidia standard for laptops and there's not much support for those. Secondly, there's no overclocking options available in the BIOS. Your CPU is what you get. You can however swap out and upgrade the CPU, slightly, to the 3.0 Ghz Intel Quad Core, but that's costly and won't make a huge difference. Thirdly, this PC is capable of expanding to 8 GB RAM, but you'll have to use 2x4 GB DDR2 sticks to do it. Not only are 4 GB memory sticks expensive, but they also have significantly more latency than smaller RAM sticks. So basically, you won't be able to upgrade the performance of this computer too much- what you see is what you get... but it's not bad!

Definately the best computer I've ever owned by miles, its dead silent and more then powerfull enough to run just about every game I have on medium to high settings, though it does struggle a little for those demanding 1st person shooters unless u drop the graphics levels. As the previous poster mentioned.... the DVD slot.... I thought mine was broken too, but you have to actually push the disk all the way in before the loader grabs it.... its a little scary at 1st because you have no clue which way to stick the DVD in (no little symbols saying which way up), and secondly it feels wrong, like you're pushing the disk in only to get it stuck and never see it again...... but at the last second, when the disk is almost all the way in you'll feel the loader grab it and pull it in. The keyboard is awesome, though I think the mouse is lacking a little in the way of buttons, its just the standard 2 button, one wheel setup. But I just hooked up my old gaming mouse and problem solved. Best thing though is the computer runs on 350Watts.... my old computer was a fraction as powerfull and ran on 750Watts.

This machine is awesome. Forget the others and buy this one. It's the best value and performance for the price. I play alot of MMO's and other games like World in Conflict and it runs all of these at the highest graphics level with no problems. I also love the fact that it comes with no real bloat ware, the only thing extra is AVG antivirus, so there is nothing to slow you down. With the liquid cooling and external power supply you don't have any noisy fans so it's ultra quiet. If the lights weren't on I wouldn't even know it was powered up. It's not really expandable, but it's all ready setup well so I don't mind.

The HP Firebird is awesome. I play Battlefield 2, 2142, 1942 and other games on high graphics. I really recomend it!!!

great computer - great for gaming and surfing the web .. looks like a piece of art

This HP Firebird desktop PC gives you style and performance! This monster powerful gaming machine give you the best performance. With a 64-bit edition of Windows Vista, your gaming PC runs fast with 4GB of RAM. The Firebird desktop PC is also good-looking.

Well the firebird is a nice system. But if you are a gamer you may want to check out real gaming pc companies. It looks great but performance cant be touched by companies that build real gaming computers. Sent mine back and i got a acs gaming computer. Oh btw you dont get lost in the loop from real gaming computer companies they know the product they build and troubleshoot it and give you much more customization options and better customer service. Thats my 2cents

OMG if ur a GAMER and play world of warcraft and this is ur purpose of getting this . Turn around and find something better. i w8 all my cash on this puppy just so i can enjoy the awsomeness of wow and /cry it was all a waste. I suggest that there is something way better for gaming for ur cash then this DeathTrap. thx