Audio|Video|Misc

Our first Radeon HD 5750 sample comes courtesy of Asus in the form of the EAH5750 Formula, a small, midrange graphics card with a rather interesting race-car style heatsink. As the HD 5000 series' energy efficiency is well-known, the unique cooler has the potential to be fairly quiet.

QWERTY still rules, even with handheld devices, and as long as there's a computer lurking, a keyboard seems unavoidable. Couch potatoes (and HTPC users) rejoice: Here are two wireless keyboards with integrated mice, designed for relaxed in-lap use.

The ATI Radeon HD 5450 and HD 5570 are the lowest models in ATI's HD 5000 family. The 5450 may make a perfect HTPC card, while the 5570 is one step up, hoping to deliver reasonable 3D performance at a reasonable price.

Logic Supply offers a Broadcom BCM970012 PCIe mini card that enables any Intel Atom system to play 1080p HD video. We give the card a compare/contrast before/after on a Intel D945GSEJT Atom board, and against two ready-made ION systems from Lenovo and Asus.

The Radeon HD 5850 is a high-end graphics card with plenty of performance enhancements over ATI's previous generation, improved power consumption, and advantages like triple display support and the ability to bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD audio.

It's not exactly an LED TV, but an LCD TV with LED backlights. Nevertheless, the UN55B7100 is the largest of Samsung's mid-level 7000 series HDTVs and sports a bewildering array of technology and features. Our focus, as usual, is on performance and practical considerations: Does it look and sound great? Does it serve martinis and peanuts?

Not content with the performance/price edge the Radeon HD 4830 currently enjoys over the GeForce 9800GT, ATI has decided to hammer the $100 graphics market further with the new Radeon HD 4770 released today. Built using a 40nm manufacturing process, ATI positions it as a better performing, more energy efficient replacement for the HD 4830.

The HD 4890 is ATI's newest GPU, on step beyond the HD 4870. It is the fastest single GPU graphics card produced by ATI. We're most interested in seeing if power consumption and noise level has improved over the 4870.

The Samsung YP-S3 is a small, slick, touch-sensitive portable audio/video media player priced at $100. SPCR's first Short Take article.

The GTS 250 shares the same GPU core as the 9800 GTX+, a midrange gaming graphics card. Though the core is unchanged, the PCB has undergone some revision, perhaps to reduce power consumption. That could be one explanation for the smaller heatsink atop Sparkle's 1GB version of the GTS 250.

The Asus EN9400GT Silent edition is a passively cooled PCI-E graphics card based on nVidia's GeForce 9400 processor. If GeForce 9 was an office hierarchy, the 9400 would be its star mail boy. To differentiate itself from the other mail boys, it only has to be silent and power efficient.

The Asus Radeon HD 4870 Matrix features two fans without a restrictive shroud, giving the heatsink more room to "breathe", and providing direct airflow to the GPU and board components. By sharing the cooling work between two fans, it should be a quieter, cooler card. We pit the Asus Matrix against ATI's reference design.

Xonar's top-of-the-line sound card tries to do everything, including a few things that, strictly speaking, it shouldn't have to. It's the first audio card to support HDCP and PAP, which means it can stream high resolution audio formats like Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio without downsampling. It also boasts high quality analogue circuitry, including Burr Brown DACs and replaceable op-amps from National Semiconductor. It designed to make audiophiles and home theater nuts excited about audio. The only question is, can it make them shell out over 200 bucks?