Raptor's Blackbird micro-ATX POWER9 System Is Ready To Take Flight This Week

The much anticipated Raptor Blackbird is set to begin shipping over the days ahead. Blackbird is the lower-cost (compared to the Talos II Secure Workstation) micro-ATX motherboard for IBM POWER9 systems and offers open-source firmware as currently one of the most open, high-performance systems available.

The Raptor Blackbird supports up to 8-core 160W Sforza POWER9 CPUs, two DDR4 ECC modules, one PCI Express 4.0 x16 slot (and one PCIe 4.0 x8), dual Gigabit Ethernet, 4 x SATA 3.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, and other standard connectivity.

Blackbird was announced at the end of last year while early this week it will now begin shipping to the first customers. We will be testing out a Blackbird and it looks like our review system already shipped out.

The Blackbird motherboard costs $999 USD or they do offer a 4-core bundle for $1279 USD and an 8-core bundle for $1604 USD.

Stay tuned for our testing of the Blackbird shortly while those wanting to learn more right now can visit RaptorCS.com for this high-performance, open-source hardware platform that is manufactured in the US.