HP Slashes Envy and Blackbird Prices

It’s been just over a month since HP announced its intention to integrate VoodooPC into its overall consumer-PC business. Today, HP announced that some of the cost savings it has realized will be passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices for the Voodoo Envy 133 notebook and HP Blackbird 002 Gaming PC.

Effective today, the price of a base-model, air-cooled Blackbird 002 gaming rig has been dropped to $1,799. That’ll buy a decent gaming rig hobbled by an underpowered videocard (specs include a dual-core Intel E8400 running at 3.0 GHz, 2GB of 1066 MHz Corsair DDR2 memory, an EVGA motherboard with an Nvidia nForce 780i chipset, and a beefy 900-watt power supply).

Upgrading the Blackbird’s wimpy ATI Radeon HD 3870 (with 512MB of GDDR4 memory) with a second card to run in CrossFire (enabling CrossFire on an Nvidia chipset is a feature unique to the Blackbird) adds $250 to the price tag. Upgrading to a single Radeon HD 4870 (with 512MB of GDDR5), on the other hand, tacks on an absurd premium of $500.

On the Voodoo notebook front, HP has shaved $200 off the price of its ultra-thin Voodoo Envy 133 (dropping its suggested retail price from $2,099 to $1,899). The base-model Envy 133 features an Intel Core 2 Duo SP7500 CPU, 2GB of 667 MHz DDR2 memory, an 80GB hard drive, and a 13.3-inch widescreen display (1280x800 resolution). For a limited time (through November 30), every new Envy 133 will come with a free second battery (a bonus that HP values at $139.99).