CES 2011: Sapphire Shows Fusion APU, HD 5570 Xtend & Set Top Box

Considering Sapphire is an AMD-centric company, they didn’t have that much new to display that we can discuss without breaking NDA. With that being said, the coming months should some interesting graphics cards from them and the acquisition of most of EVGA’s motherboard development team means major moves on that side of things as well.


Pure Fusion Mini E-350

It has been a while since we last saw a Pure motherboard from Sapphire but at CES they were showing a number of products which revive this brand. The one we are able to talk about is the Fusion Mini which uses AMD’s E-350 APU and comes in a mini-ITX form factor. With the onboard HD 6130 GPU and HDMI 1.4 outputs, it should have no issue coping with today’s high definition content while SATA 3 and USB 3.0 ports ensure compatibility with next generation storage devices.




HD 5570 Xtend

TV Tuner cards have been around for a long, long time and Sapphire is trying to revive them once again by piggybacking one onto the PCB of a custom HD 5570. Supposedly, recording software will also be included so this card can also be used as part of a PVR setup for HTPCs.




Set Top Box

With the advent of Intel’s Atom processors, miniaturized set top boxes became a reality and they have been gradually refined over the years. Sapphire is now jumping on the bandwagon with what they bill as the smallest, most compact STB currently available. Based upon a dual core Atom but lacking the disk drive of larger units, it has all of the high definition outputs one could ask for and should blend in very well with anyone’s home theater setups.