Razer today announced the appointment of Rahul Sood as advisor to the Razer board of directors. "I'm a fan of Rahul's work at VoodooPC, and it is our shared passion for PC gaming and technological innovation that makes his involvement with Razer so relevant and exciting," says Min-Liang Tan , Razer CEO. "In fact, it was his work at VoodooPC that inspired us to enter the systems business, and I believe his advice will be invaluable to us here at Razer."

Sood will provide strategic counsel on all aspects of Razer's business, from global operations to sales, marketing and product development, as the brand continues to evolve its business in the United States and abroad.

In addition to the several new notebooks, HP today released the successor of the award-winning HP Blackbird 002, called HP Firebird. Designed for photo and video editing, music creation, gaming and other demanding tasks, the HP Firebird comes in an extremely sleek and original chassis, but that's not all. Inside this beautiful shell HP has integrated a complete watercooling system that cools the CPU, the two graphics cores and the motherboard's chipset. Speaking of CPUs and VGAs, the Firebird is partly customizable. It supports the latest Core 2 Quad processors (Q9400 - 2.66GHz or Q9550 - 2.83GHz), up to 8GB of DDR2 RAM, and comes with dual NVIDIA GeForce 9800S small form factor graphics cards in SLI configuration and two hot-swappable 320GB hard drives. Also, the Firebird ships with a 350W external power supply, to help keeping the system as cool as possible. The HP Firebird with Voodoo DNA will be available online at VoodooPC.com on January 9th starting at $1,799. Customers also can purchase the product in select retail stores nationwide starting on February 1st. Find more information here.

HP Announced two gaming mice based on the Voodoo DNA design methodology. The first one being HDX Laser Mouse and the other, Laser Gaming Mouse VoodooDNA. The HDX model has five programmable buttons, a somewhat ambidextrous design and 2400 dpi scan resolution (sensitivity). It stores up to five user profiles for button and sensitivity settings.

The VoodooDNA mouse comes with the kind of design you would expect from VoodooPC, a company acquired by HP about two years ago, that specializes in building gaming PCs. It comes with HP VoodooDNA software that gives gamers control over the mouse along with options to tweak and tune it, which also allows storage of up to 25 button profiles that gamers can switch to, specific to their games. It has a resolution of 3200 dpi. The HDX Laser Mouse will be priced at US $39.99, while the VoodooDNA mouse will carry a price tag of $59.99. Images (in order) of VoodooDNA Laser Mouse and HDX Laser are provided.

VoodooPC is now offering a new performance notebook equipped with Intel's Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor and up to 600GB of hard disk space. The Envy H:171 is one of the first notebooks to be available with Intel's latest mobile processor. In addition to the 2.66GHz quad-core CPU with 8MB of L2 cache, the system has a 17" WUXGA screen (1920x1200) and can be ordered with up to three hard drives. The base version of the X6800 system with 1GB of memory and a single 80GB drive sells for just under $6000. However, VoodooPC offers plenty of option to elevate the price to more than $8400 - including up to 4GB memory, three hard drives (with up to 600GB capacity according to the press release and up to 750GB according to the configuration page), a TV tuner and a $650 custom paint job with tattoo finishes.