ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition Hands-On Preview

Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition

ATI has been showing off its six-monitor behemoth for some time, and it's finally ready for consumption. Today, ATI released the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition. As a GPU, the card is pretty much a regular Radeon HD 5870 except with 2GB of GDDR5 memory and the ability to support six monitors simultaneously. The regular Radeon HD 5870 supports three monitors and has 1GB of RAM. ATI expects immediate availability and has priced the card at $479.

The Details
850MHz Core
1600 Stream Processors
2GB of GDDR5 RAM
1200MHz RAM
6 x Mini DisplayPort Outputs

The Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinty 6 Edition has six Mini DisplayPort connectors on the back, and like with previous Radeon HD 5000 series parts, you will need to connect a DisplayPort monitor somewhere in the mess, or at least purchase active DisplayPort adapters for DVI/HDMI/VGA monitors, which generally run for about $100 apiece. You can connect up to two monitors with passive adapters, then the rest have to be native DisplayPort or connected via active adapters. Included in the package are 2x Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapters, 2x passive link DisplayPort to DVI dongles, and one Mini DisplayPort to HDMI dongle.

Boxes Six Legged Octopus Behind the madness

Monitor Setup

When everything arrived it was as though our office had turned into a warehouse--boxes were everywhere. Six monitors and two monitor mounts require a lot of packaging. The monitors took a few hours to set up, and expect to spend even more time if you want to do the job with OCD levels of correctness. Monitor mounts require lots of adjustments to set up perfectly; otherwise you're left with minor gaps and imperfections rather unbefitting of such a costly beast.

The Total

Speaking of price--if the video card has you trembling, we've only just begun to add up everything. ATI sent six Dell P2210H monitors, each of which costs $220. Then we need to factor in the mounts, because you will need something to put these things on. Also in the package were the Adtec V-FS-Q (a $300 quad monitor stand) and the Adtec V-FS-DV (a $140 dual monitor stand). The quad was an absolute pain the neck to set up. Adjusting and setting up the dual stand was far, far easier. Seeing as the cost is pretty much the same, if we had to do it over again, we'd go with three duals and live with two extra feet sticking out.

6 x $220 Dell P2210H Monitors + $300 Adtec V-FS-Q + $140 Adtec V-FS-DV + $480 Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition = $2240

Software Setup

ATI has done a decent job of making six monitors play nicely, but the experience could definitely stand some improvement. The drivers make it easy to set up a single group of monitors, like one big six-monitor setup at 5760x2160. Putting together multiple groups is frustrating though. You'll have to disable monitors and then re-add them to groups. The only problem is that the monitor symbols don't translate to anything meaningful, which means you'll be doing some guesswork to select the right ones. Once that's done, you can save profiles to the desktop that let you quickly switch between groups of monitors (1x6, 2x3, and so on), but even there we encountered minor issues with incorrect loads and crashing. ATI is working relatively quickly to address issues, so we imagine that everything should get smoother as time goes on. The technology is quite young, so expect to encounter more than your fair share of bugs when it comes to launching games and adjusting settings.