NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 430: The Next HTPC King?

It’s been 7 months since the launch of the first Fermi cards, and at long last we’re here: we’ve reached the end of the road on the Fermi launch. Today NVIDIA is launching the final GPU in the first-generation Fermi stack into the add-in card market, launching the GeForce GT 430 and the GF108 GPU that powers it. After months of launches and quite a bit of anticipation we have the complete picture of Fermi, from the massive GTX 480 to today’s tiny GT 430.

For the GT 430, NVIDIA is taking an interesting position. AMD and NVIDIA like to talk up their cheaper cards’ capabilities in HTPC environments but this is normally in the guise of an added feature. Rarely do we see a card launched on one or two features and today is one of those launches. NVIDIA believes that they’ve made the ultimate HTPC card, and that’s the line they’re going to be using to sell it; gamers need not apply. So just what is NVIDIA up to, and do they really have the new king of the HTPC cards? Let’s find out.

 

ASRock’s High-End Vision 3D HTPC Reviewed

We have been reviewing their HTPC offerings since they first came out their Ion based HTPC last year. After starting out at the low end, they soon moved up to place mid-range products aimed at the mainstream consumer with the Core 100 series. The Core 100 HT-BD received a very good review from us, and when ASRock informed us about their high-end offering in the Vision 3D, we were quite excited.

When a company is confident enough to send across an engineering sample prior to sending across the production review unit, it is quite clear that they are extremely proud of their product and its features. We have been playing with the Vision 3D for close to a month now (first with the engineering sample, and then with the review unit). Read on to find out more about the Vision 3D and how it performs.

PowerColor HD 5770 Low Profile Edition packs Arctic cooler

For HTPC owners looking to enter the DirectX 11 era, Tul Corp-owned PowerColor has developed a ‘real’ low-profile Radeon HD 5770. On display at PowerColor’s Computex booth, the half-height card offers DVI and HDMI outputs and is equipped with a dual-fan cooler from Arctic (Arctic Cooling).

The Radeon HD 5770 Low Profile Edition also boasts 800 Stream Processors, a 850 MHz GPU clock ,a 128-bit memory interface backed by 1GB of GDDR5 VRAM @ 4800 MHz, and lacks CrossFireX support. The card’s pricing and availability were not announced but it should be long before we see it in stores – maybe up to a month.

Tranquil PC introduces tiny, fanless media PC with NVIDIA ION

There was a time when Home Theater PCs, or HTPCs had to be big, pwoerful systems with fast processors, enormous hard drives, and room for a couple of TV tuners to record live TV broadcasts. And while there’s still definitely room for those systems, a few developments have led to a surge in low power nettops that are about hte size of a Nintendo Wii and which look an awful lot better sitting next to your TV than a gargantuan box with a PC stuffed inside.

First, a growing amount of digital media people expect to consume can be either streamed or downloaded from the web, so a TV tuner is increasingly optional. And second, NVIDIA has shown that you don’t necessarily need a powerful processor if all you want to do is watch (or even transcode) high definition video. You can pair an NVIDIA ION chip with a low power Atom processor and build a low power HTPC that costs less money to run and takes up less space.

Personally, I still have a larger PC with a Core 2 Duo processor dedicated to recording live TV shows and compressing the recordings to DiVX to save space on the hard drive — something that’s difficult to automate on an ION-based system. But I also use Hulu Desktop, Boxee and other online video services to catch up on programming that’s not available over the air, and I could totally see picking up a media center like the Tranquil T7-MP2.

Tranquil PC is a UK-based PC maker, and the T7-MP2 is a new system with an Intel Atom D510 dual core processor and NVIDIA ION graphics. It has HDMI, DVI, and VGA video outputs, and SPDIF and analog audio outputs. The system is also nearly silent, thanks to the passive cooling system — there’s no fan.

There are 6 USB ports and an eSATA port for additional storae space, and the nettop supports 802.11b/g/n WiFi. There’s no optical disc drive built in, but you an attach one via one of those USB ports.

The T7-MP2 runs Windows 7 Home Premium with Windows Media Center functionality, and it’s compatible with an array of US internet television services including the BBC iPlayer, SKY Player, and ITV Player.

The base model runs £479 and comes with a media center remote control, 2GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive, but you can up the specs if you’re willing to pay a little more. The Tranquil PC T7-MP2 will ship starting on May 30th, but it’s available for pre-order today.

HIS unveils the Radeon HD 5550 Silence 1GB card

People in need of peace, quiet and a low-end DirectX 11 cards are in luck (more or less) as Hightech Information System aka HIS is readying the release of a passively-cooled, low-profile Radeon HD 5550 graphics card.

The new HTPC-loving Radeon packs a 40nm Redwood GPU with 400 Stream Processors and a working frequency of 550 MHz, a 128-bit memory interface backed by 1GB DDR2 VRAM @ 800 MHz, a single-slot heatsink, plus D-Sub, DVI and HDMI outputs.

The HIS 5550 Silence 1GB is bundled with BumpTop’s intuitive 3D desktop environment and should hit stores in the coming weeks.

Asus presents the Bravo220 passively-cooled graphics card

Asus has just revealed the Bravo220 low-profile graphics card which is aimed for HTPC use and takes full advantage of the Splendid Plus technology, an image enhancement suite that automatically optimizes video content based on ambient lighting conditions (a light sensor is bundled). Splendid Plus also reduces noise and artifacts so the end result is a sharper, clearer and more vivid image.

The Bravo220 itself if a passive-cooled GeForce GT 220 boasting a 525 MHz core clock, a shader frequency of 1360 MHz, a 128-bit memory interface and 1GB of VRAM @ 800 MHz, plus D-Sub, DVI and HDMI outputs. Asus’ card is now available for pre-order @ 70 Euro.

Pegatron’s NVIDIA Tegra powered HTPC does HD video

Who says you need an x86 compatible processor to create a home theater PC? No, seriously, who? I mean, I tend to think of desktop apps like Windows Media Center SageTV, Boxee, or MythTV when I think of media centers… but three out of four of those apps will run on Linux. And you can run Linux on a system with a low power ARM-based procesor.

And Pegatron is showing off just such a system, with a next generation NVIDIA Tegra chipset which combines an ARM CPU with NVIDIA graphics to enable support for 1080p HD video playback. It can handle high definition Flash video as well.

This particular model is designed to run Windows CE or Google Android. But there’s no reason you couldn’t essentially turn it into a Boxee Boxx (minus the awkwardly shaped case) by loading up a Linux distribution and installing the Boxee Linux client.

Four new Zotac MAG HTPCs coming up

Even before it releases some GeForce GTX 400 series cards, Hong Kong-based Zotac is reported to be rolling out four fresh MAG mini PCs / HTPCs based on the recently-revealed ZBOX design. The upcoming systems measure 18.8 (L) x 18.8 x 4.4 (D) cm and feature a 160GB hard drive, an SDHC card reader, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi and eSATA connectivity.

As for the rest of the specs, they look something like this:

– HD-ID11 model – 1.66 GHz Atom 510 dual-core CPU / 1GB of RAM / Next-gen ION (GT218 GPU with 512MB dedicated memory) / $255
– HD-ND21 model – 1.3 GHz Processor SU4100 dual-core CPU /2GB of RAM / ION (first-gen) / $300
– HD-ND02 model – 1.6 GHz Atom 330 dual-core CPU / 2GB of RAM (DDR3) / ION (first-gen) / $217
– HD-AD01 model – 1.5 GHz Athlon X2 Neo L325 dual-core CPU / 2GB of RAM / Radeon HD 3200 / $242.

Zotac’s new MAGs are said to debut later this month.