HIS Radeon 6850 & 6870 review

Monitor connectivity - Eyefinity

You guys will notice that the new 6800 series cards have a plethora of monitor connectors. Quite a bit has changed. The reference design cards will carry two mini DisplayPort (v1.2) connectors, one HDMI 1.4a connector and two DVI connectors of which one is single link, the other dual-link.

DisplayPort is now up-to snuff at revision v1.2 and that allows for a lot of extra bandwidth, in fact per connector you could drive up-to three monitors, so if you use both DP 1.2 connectors, up-to 6 monitors will be supported. Unfortunately that isn't all, connecting six monitors to two DisplayPort connectors will require an external breakout-box or monitors that support a daisy chain (very expensive). The external breakout-box I mentioned will be called a MST HUB (Multi Stream Transport), to date pricing and availability for that is unknown.

Of course, you can configure Eyefinity as you please, through multiple monitors per DP connector, or one at a time with the help of the DVI connectors.

DP 1.2 can support six monitors per two connectors, but will require a breakout box or daisy chain compatible monitors. So really you are back to three easy to connect monitors. We advise three monitors as a maximum for Eyefinity anyway.

Eyefinity

An exciting feature that started in the Radeon series 5000, and now continued on the 6000 series graphics cards is Eyefinity. You will have no problem connecting say, three 30" monitors at 2560x1600. The graphics card can take that resolution and in fact combine the screen resolution and play in it.

ATI's Series 6000 graphics cards will be able to drive one to six monitors per graphics card depending on the limitations we just mentioned in the previous chapter about monitor connectivity. We've tested this live in action, and Eyefinity works really nicely. You can combine monitors and get your groove on up-to say 7680x3200 pixels separated over several monitors -- multiple monitors to be used as a single display.

So some examples of what you can do here:

• Single monitor setup at 2560x1600
• Dual monitor setup at 2560x1600 per monitor
• Triple monitor setup at 2560x1600 per monitor
• Six monitors setup at 1920x1080 per monitor

Eyefinity is a really nice feature, and sure, we also understand that 99% of you guys will never use more than two monitors. That other 1% definitely matches the Guru3D audience. Personally I like to game on three screens. It's really immersive. If you are bold enough to go for a multi-monitor setup, it really is ideal to get three screens for flight sims, racing games, role playing games, real-time strategy (huge maps!), first-person shooters and sure, even multimedia apps.

We have two reviews available on Eyefinity:

• Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity (three monitors) review - click here.
• Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 (six monitors) review - click here.

Eyefinity is modular and thus allows users to rearrange the number of discrete images created in addition to their shape according to your liking. Guru3D users and gamers will no doubt find this setup to their liking. It will be interesting to learn just what kind of living room you have if you were to employ such a configuration. Please post your setups in our forums, we'd love to hear from you.

Now, since monitor bezels are a little icky I have created the above video to show you how you could do it as well ;)