HP to Offer Custom Compaq Gaming PCs

PunkerTFC writes "Announced in the run-up to E3, Hewlett-Packard will offer custom built-to-order gaming machines under the Compaq brand, according to Reuters. The machines will be avalible in June or July and 'offer a range of options with standard, off-the-shelf components.' HP has been selling a Compaq gaming machine on a limited basis through a few select retailers already - apparently, 'Those pilot sales... convinced the company that it could compete in a market where well-known specialty manufacturers like Alienware, Voodoo and Falcon Northwest face increasing competition from mainstream players like Dell Inc'. The X Gaming machines will feature 'a standard chassis from CoolerMaster, known for its work in keeping system noise down while also decreasing heat, and red glowing lights in front and back what will make it stand out in the dark.'"

Build yer own

[Hecubas]

If you have the time, I highly recommend builing your own. Check out some of the popular tech sites and read the reviews.

A hot gaming system nowadays mostly consists of a $300 video card and whatever hardware will support it. Get the a AMD 64bit chip, a good mobo (Abit, Asus, etc.), some fast RAM (Corsair, etc) and your looking at a system under $1500 that will kick the snot out of their proposed $3K system.

The Compaq brand is the 100% wrong move

[drinkypoo]

I would be dramatically more likely to consider a PC sold under the HP brand than the Compaq brand, if I didn't understand that they were the same company now. Every compaq machine I have ever used and/or owned was crap except my laptop (Presario 1692) which was passable. By contrast, some of the HP Kayak machines were very nice, and most of the Vectras weren't all that bad.

Re:Odd Choice of Brands, Maybe

[UserChrisCanter4]

I honestly couldn't point to the source that says this, but I remember them ultimately deciding that Compaq would be reintroduced as their "enthusiasts" brand, for people who tinkered a bit more with their PCs and demanded a bit more hardware (video editing folks, gamers, the guy who needs the new chip because it's new).

I suppose some market survey showed that Compaq owners did this more often than HP owners, or that people who were a bit more into hardware specs looked more favorably on the compaq name.

Toward the end of Compaq's stand-alone life, they were actually using some nice, deskpro-derived towers and were one of the first big-name companies to embrace the Athlon processor in their higher-range consumer equipment. They were also a big supporter of the Athlon/DDR combo during the P4A days when the only non-RDRAM chipset from intel supported PC133 SDRAM. Both of those things would indicate that, at least from a strategy standpoint, Compaq might have counted on their customers being slightly more informed on the hardware side of things than otherwise. Or it might just have been a gamble, who knows?

Again, I swear the first point about the enthusiast brand was from one of their official statements post-merger, where they started talking about what lines from each company would be dropped. Given those sorts of examples, though, I don't think it's too terribly far fetched.

DVD+R in HP machines

[achacha]

If only they would stop pushing DVD+R down everyone's throat, it's the least compatible format and the only one HP offers with their machines.

Call me crazy...

[Otto]

But I want a gaming rig that will smoke the hell out of other people with it's blazingly fast processor power, not it's stylish looks.

Looks are fine, and I got nothing against case modding. Hell, I painted my Pentium 100 PC's case neon orange back in 1995 or 1996, before weird cases became popular. That's beside the point. A gaming rig is meant for high powered, speed processing for lightning fast 3d gaming. Anything else is just extraneous.

And a pre-bought modded case, stamped out on a line, kinda strikes me as lame as hell. The point of case modding is to make something impressive. Seeing 100 copies of the same thing is no longer impressive. Okay, I might buy parts and mod it, or I might buy a modded case and put it together with some of my own addons, or I might even have somebody else do a custom paint job for me because I lack that kind of expertise or artistic ability... but these are more timesavers than anything else. Buying a whole pre-modded system out of a catalog is just silly and not l33t. :-P

I realize that HP bought compaq

[xutopia]

but isn't it ridiculous to continue using the compaq brand name? What is so different from Compaq and HP machines? We all know that a Compaq machine is an HP one. Am I missing something or am I the only one who finds that this just doesn't make much sense?

Re:Well...

[dasmegabyte]

What about warcraft 3, unreal tournament 2k4 or neverwinter nights?

Not to mention Escape Velocity: Nova, which r0x0red.

Re:Well...

[Paulrothrock]

Or MS Office. Or Nisus Writer. Or Macromedia Studio MX, or UT2k4, or these [apple.com] or these [apple.com] or some of these [versiontracker.com]. Oh, and don't forget about Fink [sourceforge.net]. 3dpong rocks when it's hardware rendered.

Re:Odd Choice of Brands, Maybe

[zerocool^]

As someone who worked on both HP's and Compaqs in the period 1999-2002 - what I remember of them was that HPs took a coon's age to get into. There were multiple screws, sometimes you had to take the bay enclosure out or the powersupply out just to get inside the case. Often, it took 30 minutes to add ram to an HP.
Compaqs on the other hand (especially the ones with the blue swirly fronts) were great. The side popped of, the power supply was to the north of the motherboard instead of in the way, it was easy to get to things, drive rails were popular... a joy to work on, and a 2 minute RAM upgrade.

So, setting up compaq as the enthusiast sounds like par for the course, as far as design. HP=small footprint and (paradoxically) compact.

~Will

Re:Odd Choice of Brands, Maybe

[pqdave]

I've had worse experience with Compaq than HP, (but come to think of it, I've had much more Compaq experience, so that may account for it...) Bios setup on it's own hard drive partition? BIOS that won't let you do a normal OS install, tries to force you into using the recovery/restore disk (not included with the system, order from Compaq)? RAM soldered to the motherboard? Cable Select hard drives? IDE cables with only one drive connection? All features of Compaq that I haven't had the misfortune of finding on an HP, or for the most part anywhere else.

Re:l33t gamers...not the market!

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Yeah, the article clearly states that HP acknowledges the fact that half of their target "hardcore gamer market" assembles their own PC. Their estimated target market is 20 million, with 10 million that just assemble their own. Their estimation of the rest of the market is often people that are intelligent enough to do their own assembly work, but just want to play games, not muck around with assembling them.

I've seen the machines at Best Buy, and I really don't see much to object to. They are pretty nice as far as I can tell, and they use the standardized "enthusiast favorite" parts minus the tacky crap that some people do. They aren't G5 Powermacs, but then, G5s aren't for gamers.

Its still a Comcrap

[Erik_Kahl]

All they're going to do is reduce the quality I can get by buying best of breed parts and inflate the price.

Last time I built a gaming machine I speced out a system on Alienware's site, then ordered the parts from newegg.com for a bit under half the price.

Since I paid the $6 more for retail box parts for components I care about (CPU, Video Card, Motherboard) I have a 3 year manufacturer warranty. When my video card colling fan started making a funy noise, I called the folks who made it and got a new one fedexed to me the next day. Dell, Compaq, Alienware and the others would never have done that. I would have had to mail the whole damn box to them or sit on my ass at home until a tech showed up to swap it out for me.

A small amount of self education can save a ton of money when it comes to building home PCs.