The Eminent 7195 is a monster of a media player. It towers above diddy streaming clients like the Apple TV and WDTV models, and would doubtless win a brawl with its HDD media player Netherlands neighbour A.C.Ryan.
All-encompassing: Eminent’s EM7195 HD server
To emphasise its size, compatibility badges are writ large and loud across its substantial aluminium casing. But then it does have a reason to shout. It’s extremely well specified. Not only is the EM7195 a media player/server, it has two integrated DVB-T terrestrial TV tuners on-board, as well as some nicely thought out file management and web services. Read the rest of this entry »
If Christmas or even the World Cup had you taking the plunge an investing in a 3D TV, then you’re probably a bit weary of watching Avatar now and if you haven’t got any kids, Alice in Wonderland may have been entertaining once, but…
Viewsonic’s 3DV5 offers the low cost perspective
So how about creating your own 3D content? If the likes of Fujifilm, JVC, Panasonic and Sony are to be believed, it’s surely the next step. Still, it’s a step that leaves a significant dent in the wallet if you’re hoping to capture 3D movies. Taking a slightly different view is the 3DV5 from Viewsonic. For £140 this rather chunky, fixed focus Camera – reminiscent of a 1990s handheld portable TV – will take stereoscopic video at 720p and 5Mp stills.
From the front, it looks like an evil penguin with the chrome frame around the two lenses and the charcoal, rubberised body that feature a Stereo microphone and a cover for the rechargeable 1200mA Li-ion battery. Read the rest of this entry »
On the face of it, Apple’s Mac Mini makes most ‘small form-factor’ PCs look like a pile of junk. The Mini’s ultra-compact design also makes it ideal for use in an office or as a stylish little media centre in the living room. Evidently, Dell has taken note – hence the appearance of its Inspiron Zino range of compact PCs.
Splits from Atom: Dell’s Inspiron Zino HD
It’s always been surprising that no Windows PC has ever really come along to challenge the Mac Mini – especially given Apple’s creeping price hikes. The Mac Mini is now far from the low-cost Mac that it was originally intended to be, with the cheapest incarnation currently priced at £510. That’s hardly a bargain given that it doesn’t include a monitor, keyboard or mouse.
We’ve seen a few compact ‘nettop’ boxes, such as Acer’s Revo, in recent months, but these have tended to use low-power Atom processors that couldn’t pass muster as a proper Desktop PC. However, Dell’s Zino HD packs a more powerful Desktop processor.
Dell simply describes the Inspiron Zino HD as a “mini Desktop computer” but its design clearly suggests that it’s intended as a living room media centre too. Measuring 195mm square and 85mm high, it’s larger than the 163 x 163 x 50mm Mac Mini. The Zino HD isn’t quite as neatly designed as the Apple, either. The black plastic chassis looks a bit cheap when sitting alongside the silvery metallic trim of the Mac. Read the rest of this entry »
Review AMD’s Radeon HD 5770 and 5750 are the mid-range members of the new HD 5000 DirectX 11 graphics chip family. They’re fabbed using a 40nm process, just like their bigger brothers.
Sapphire’s HD 5770: reference Radeon HD 5770 design
But the number of transistors in these mid-range chips – codenamed ‘Juniper’ – has been reduced by just over a half, from the 2.15bn in the 58×0 design, codenamed ‘Cypress’, to 1.04bn. The area of the chip has also been quartered, from 334mm² to 166mm².
Armed with that information, you won’t be surprised to learn that the number of unified shaders in 5770 has been halved too. Which is to say that the 5870 has 1600 shaders and the 5770 has 800. The 5750 has 720.
When it comes to clock speeds, the 5770 has the same 850MHz core speed as 5870 while the 5750 runs at 700MHz, which is slightly slower than the 5850′s 725MHz frequency. The specification of the memory breaks with tradition as the junior 5750 and 5770 use 1GB of GDDR 5 just like the grown-up 5850 and 5870. In the past, we’ve been accustomed to mid-range chips that use slower memory than their high-end siblings do. The high-end chips use a 256-bit memory controller while the new mid-rangers settle for a 128-bit controller. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Before we dive into our review of the HIS Digital HD 5870 and Sapphire HD 5870 graphics cards, let’s take a quick look at the technology behind the AMD’s new family of graphics chips.
Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5870: a 50 per cent gaming performance boost…
These DirectX 11 graphics cores use the same 40nm fabrication process that we saw in the ATI Radeon HD 4770 and this has allowed AMD to increase the transistor count by a huge margin. The 55nm HD 4870 packed 956m transistors into a die size of 263mm² while the new 40nm HD 5870 has 2.15bn transistors – 2.25 times more – in a die area of 334mm², 27 per cent bigger than the previous one.
Most of those extra transistors have been used to double the number of stream processors, or unified shaders, and the remainder support the DirectX 11 features that will be introduced with Windows 7. Read the rest of this entry »
