Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 XtendTV

Sapphire HD 5570 XtendTV 1GB GDDR5 review

Graphics card and TV tuner in one? The Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 Xtend TV sure is an all-in-wonder... Lately, it's not enough for a GPU to just be a GPU. Until now they could happily occupy 3 PCI slots, chewing through more energy than a space shuttle whilst belching out enough fan noise to drown out any game. But the glory days for these boards might be coming to an end. AMD's trending Fusion tech sees the GPU and CPU integrated into one chip, and now we have some manner of GPU and integrated TV tuner devilment from Sapphire, who have their fingers dipped deeply into both these pies. By offering the HD5570 Xtend TV with DirectX 11 gaming and DVB-T reception for less than an evening in the Ivy, they seem keen to sound the death-bell for traditional graphics cards. But do gamers want TV tuners with their gaming GPUs? Are those in the market for a decent tuner willing to shell out more to replace their primary GPU? As a GPU alone, the Radeon HD 5570 model is a decent little budget card using the same 'Redwood' core as its big brother, the Radeon HD 5670. It sports 400 shader cores and 16 ROPs. It can just about handle Crysis, tessellate polygons, and alone it'll cost you less than fifty quid. As a gaming card, it's a pretty good piece of silicon for the cash.