CES 2011 Coverage

Sapphire:

As with every year, Sapphire has always had a nice preview of what is to come at CES and beyond. Today we were able to take a peek at a few of these technologies. Some of them are still under embargo, so be patient and trust me, it will be worth it. Nevertheless, some of the items we can talk about will have you salivating. Sapphire is well known for its graphics cards, but there is way more to the company than just that. What Sapphire had on display for us definitely peaked our interests, as I am sure it will yours as well. After being greeted by the ever welcoming Ruby, we finally got to see the goods that Sapphire had in store.

As I am sure a lot of you have heard, AMD is launching its Fusion APU (Advanced Processing Unit) here at CES 2011. These new APUs are AMD's shift into fully competing with the Atom/ION combination and are designed to give you the best performance for price/size possible. The Sapphire board that was on display for us was the Pure Fusion Mini E350, which used the new AMD E350 APU processor paired with an AMD Radeon HD6130 graphics core for a small but powerful combination. This board is not currently available, but keep an eye out for variations in the near future.

A few other goodies that were on display for us were custom made cases from NFC Systems. These cases were hand-made specifically for Sapphire for the CES 2011 event. The first case is a smaller design for home theater use. Inside is an ITX motherboard with a 2.5" laptop hard drive and even a Blu-ray drive designed for space-saving, yet awesome power. The second was a custom case designed for an upcoming unnamed motherboard paired with a CrossFire set of graphic cards. What I was most amazed with was that the case used bullet-proof glass for the light logo. For more information on these and other custom cases, visit NFC Systems.

The last few things that Sapphire had on display for us were an upcoming Radeon HD 5570 card with an integrated TV tuner and a new mini PC. While this is not news for a video card, this specific edition uses software to project the programming through the web in real time, allowing you to watch the TV from home using a browser from anywhere in the world. The technology called "Xtend TV" pairs with a client designed for each individual card, allowing the user to view the programming live as the system receives it on the client. The other new product in the works is a Sapphire mini PC built around an Atom chipset giving the user a small yet powerful media player and computer designed to handle media and other day-to-day tasks. Final pricing was not available, but keep your eyes peeled for these two products soon.