14 DAY TRIAL // Sapphire has just announced a new graphics card that brings back some of the memories of ATI's All-in-Wonder series, as the Sapphire HD 5570 XtendTV pairs a DVB-T tuner together with a Redwood GPU, making it an interesting option for users interested in building an entry-level HTPC.
Connected to a standard TV antenna, the built-in tuner will receive all of the local free to air TV and radio stations, allowing its users to record, save and playback programs at will.
In addition, thanks to the FlexiStream software, programs can also be streamed to the Internet so you can watch them while away from home or on a portable device without having to worry about licences or IP issues.
Although no details regarding the bandwidth needed are provided, a regular Internet connection should suffice as the streams are encoded on the host computer using the parallel processing functions of AMD's GPU.
Speaking of the GPU, the Radeon HD 5570 is based on the Redwood core and packs 400 stream processors, 20 texturing units, 8 ROPs and a 128-bit memory interface.
The graphics card can be configured with either DDR3 or GDDR5 memory, Sapphire opting for 1GB of the latter.
As far as clock speeds are concerned, the Chinese manufacturer doesn't specify the frequencies that its model runs at, but the regular HD 5570 has its core clocked at 650MHz while the memory runs anywhere in between 900MHz and 1000MHz.
The card uses a single slot cooling solution and packs a DVI video output as well as an HDMI 1.3a port with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio support.
Power draw is estimated at a rather low 39W, so the HD 5570 XtendTV doesn't require any additional power except that provided by the PCI Express port.
No details regarding pricing have been made available at this time as the card isn't even listed on Sapphire's website.