Widescreen Gaming Forum

Currently I have a 26" (1920x1200) monitor as my main, with a 19" (1280x1024) to the left. I am thinking of picking up a cheap second 19" (the same as my current one) to go on the right of my main monitor. I have a ATi 4870 gfx card which has 2x DVI (currently using them both) and a DP connector. What I'm wanting to know, is what kind of adaptor will I need for the displayport to make it work, as I've seen that only active ones work for eyefinity, but as I'm not using eyefinity, I wasn't sure if it still applied for the third monitor or not.

Cheers

The reason you need an active adapter is because the cards only have 2 RAMDAC's on them. So I imagine regardless of eyefinity or not you're going to need an active adapter assuming the 4870 also only has 2 RAMDAC's (I can't really imagine it having more than 2).

Oh, ok, that makes sense then, I'll have to try and find one that's not too expensive...

Cheers

You can't do Eyefinity with 4870. You need 5000 series for this I'm afraid. :(

I wasn't meaning using eyefinity, I just want it in extended mode. Mainly for work purposes, there has been far too many times I've needed to reference to 2 or more programs/documents whilst working on a third :(

I wasn't meaning using eyefinity, I just want it in extended mode. Mainly for work purposes, there has been far too many times I've needed to reference to 2 or more programs/documents whilst working on a third :(

ATI added a lot of display pipelines for their 5000 series, so they could add more screens. The 4000 series might not have enough display pipelines to run 3 screens. I haven't read about anyone that have accomplished to add a third screen on a single card with 4000 series.

If you just want extended mode and you use either XP or Windows 7, you can just add another cheap card regardless of vendor, and it will use that card for its clocks. If you don't have support for 2 cards, there are still PCI cards which use can use in the slots instead, or perhaps that usb -> monitor dongle? :)