HD5870 Graphics Card
I’ve had my eye on the HD5870 Series for quite some time. Ever since it came out, the possibility of running six screens off of one card fascinated me (after all, what geek wouldn’t love to have THAT?). So when one of my friends told me it was on a killer sale, I couldn’t let it pass me by. It took me a while to get it up and running, but that was no fault of the card. I didn’t have a power supply capable of pushing the wattage this card needs, after all it uses both a 6pin and 8pin power connector!
Once I got it running with my dual 24 inch Acer H243H monitors I had a slight resolution problem. Turns out that, by default, when using an HDMI cable, this card’s driver compresses the image 15%. It took a little digging, but I eventually was able to override that setting and was back to full resolution.
The biggest pain with this card is the fact that in order to run more than two monitors, you have to buy extra mini Display Port adapters. Oh, it came with enough of them alright, but they are mini Display Port to normal Display Port… There is only one HDMI and one DVI… What sort of world does ATI think we are living in?? One dominated by Apple monitors or even Display Port capable monitors? No, of course not. So why couldn’t they have included two HDMI and two DVI and then just two Display Port instead of four of the useless things?
Okay, rant over. Back to running three or more displays. In order to do it, you have to buy more adapters. That doesn’t sound too bad, until you find out that they have to be special active adapters. It has to do with the way the threading of the ports is setup, but we won’t go into the details on that here. The point is, you’ll need to get four more HDMI or DVI adapters at ~$25 appice, or five if you want to use all the same types for each of your monitors.
Outside of those two complaints, this card has been worth every penny. Obviously I haven’t had a chance to test performance running six monitors, but hopefully I’ll get to try that soon. I can run Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood at 1080p using the highest graphics settings and the card only runs at about 20-30% and the temp only raises by no more than 3-5 degrees C. That’s pretty darn good performance! Although the marketing will try to tell you otherwise, there are not very many games that support custom resolutions, which is required in order to run a game on more than one monitor. However, I trust that more and more games will start supporting this feature as these cards become more readily available to gamers.