Day One: Psyko, VoodooPC

Psyko

One of new companies showing their wares at CES this year was Psyko Audio Labs. Headed by James Hildebrandt, a mechanical engineer with graduate work in audio acoustics, Psyko was touting their 5.1 gaming headset. The Psyko 5.1 headset is geared directly at the gaming market and advertises that is uses an entirely new way of playing positional audio. Complete specs weren’t available at this time, but Psyko hopes to price the headset at $299 when it gets released later this year.

Pskyo 5.1 Gaming headset

The Psyko is unique in that the speakers are located in the headband instead of ear cups, which has channels that direct the sound downward. When the sound reaches the hollow cups, it reverberates as it would in an empty room, which should then give you excellent positional audio without the added latency of Digital Signal Processing. The Psyko also sports a boom microphone and subwoofers in the ear cups, for extra bump. An interesting feature they showed us was the ear cup vents they built in to keep your noggin from getting too hot and heavy during extended gaming sessions. We tested the Psyko briefly and found it to be quite comfortable and unique. They had a demo setup with Call of Duty 2 and the sound results were interesting, but we wouldn’t call them earth-shattering. We’d be interested to try the Psyko with some more modern games, as they might produce more immersive results.

VoodooPC

Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of Voodoo was a direct answer to the Dell/Alienware gaming juggernaut created in the Spring of 2006. VoodooPC helped design and release the HP Blackbird, which won numerous awards for its performance and design innovations. Since then, product releases have been somewhat infrequent as HP restructured its internal organization to better allow its high-end components time to gestate. This year, HP/Voodoo has announced their follow-up to the Blackbird, the Firebird gaming PC.

HP Firebird

Notice the screw that grants access to the HD's

Backside of the Firebird

HP Firebird with Voodoo DNA
CPU	Intel Q9400 (803: Q9550)
Memory	4GB PC6400 DDR2
Graphics	nVidia GeForce 9800S SLI
Storage	2x 250GB 5400RPM SATA (803: 2x 320GB)
Optical	Slot-load 8x DVD-RW (803: 8x DVD-RW/Blu-ray with HDMI)
Audio	Integrated Intel HD Audio (803: X-Fi Mini Card)
Available/Price	802: Jan 2009;$1799 803: Jan. 2009; $2099

HP has designed a lot of really interesting features into the Firebird, including an external 350w power supply and built-in liquid cooling. Yes that’s right, the Firebird only uses about 350 watts of power. For the Firebird, Voodoo used a lot of mobile components to keep power consumption down, such as the mobile 9800S and 5400RPM hard drives. The hard drives are also hot swappable and easily removed thanks to the proprietary storage system that’s been integrated into the case.

Another neat “green” feature is the ability to disable the SLI with the push of a button. This cuts down both power consumption and heat output. The Firebird will be available in 2 SKU’s eventually, with the upgraded 803 featuring a faster CPU and Blu-Ray drive.

The Cooling system covers all the major components

Side panel graphics

External power supply