June 27th, 2010
XFX Radeon HD5870 2 GB Eyefinity6 Review @ Bjorn3D
One of the new features of the HD5xxxx series of video cards is Eyefinity, the technique that allows you to hook up several monitors to the video card and have the OS see it as one big monitor. While regular HD5xxx cards can support up to 3 monitors the ultimate Eyefinity experience can only be had with a HD5870 Eyefinity6 Edition video card which, as its name implies, supports up to 6 monitors at the same time.
AMD was kind enough to lend us 6 monitors so we could test one of these cards and in today’s review we test to see if the XFX HD5870 Eyefinity6 Edition video card together with 6 nice Dell monitors indeed does deliver the ultimate gaming experience.
The ability to hook up more than one monitor to your video card is not really a new feature and has been possible for many years regardless if you have been using an ATI/AMD card, a NVIDIA card or a card from any of the other minor players. What makes Eyefinity different is that it makes it possible to combine the attached monitors in different ways so that they are seen as one (or more) larger monitors by the OS. AMD isn’t actually the first company to offer this feature. The company Matrox has had this feature in both separate boxes and in some of their professional video cards for a while but AMD is the first one to offer it in high performance consumer video cards.
The “old” multi-monitor support allows you to either clone your main screen so that the same image is visible on all screens or span the desktop so you get more screen-estate to put your program windows on. Spanning might sound the same as making multiple monitors appear as one monitor but it isn’t. While you are spanning the desktop the OS still sees each monitor as a separate monitor and if you maximize a window while on one of the monitors it only will maximize to the full screen of that monitor, not of the full spanned screen estate. Another issue with spanning and cloning is that it isn’t easy to use it in games as very few games directly support more monitors using either cloning or spanning.
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- READ MORE (Source): XFX HD5870 2 GB Eyefinity6 with 6 monitors – the ultimate gaming experience? – Bjorn3D.com



