Raptor Blackbird Micro-ATX POWER9 Motherboard Pre-Orders Open Up At $799 USD

At the start of October, Raptor Computing Systems announced Blackbird as a lower-cost POWER9 motherboard built on a micro-ATX footprint. We now have the firm specs on this motherboard as well as the current pricing as the pre-order window has just opened.

Raptor Blackbird is the lowest-cost POWER9 board we've seen to date while being quite promising on the feature front. Earlier this month they probed their customer base about Blackbird potentially coming in at just under $900 USD while today the pre-order period has begun. Raptor is running a Black Friday / Cyber Monday special where this micro-ATX motherboard can be pre-ordered for $799 USD.

The Blackbird specs include support for one IBM POWER9 Sforza CPU (up to 8 cores / 160 Watts), dual DDR4 ECC DIMM slots, one PCI Express 4.0 x16 slot, one PCI Express 4.0 x8 slot, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, 4 x SATA 3.0 ports, 4 x USB 3.0 ports, 1 x USB 2.0 port, an ASpeed BMC controller backed by OpenBMC, HDMI display output, and a 5.1 channel audio controller.

Like Raptor's high-end Talos series, the Blackbird is open-source down to the firmware. The hardware also continues to be manufactured in the USA.

Pre-orders are now open while Raptor Computing Systems expects to begin shipping the motherboards by late Q1'2019. More details and pre-ordering via RaptorCS.com.