Widescreen Gaming Forum

Thinking of going with ati when they get their six port card or/if the 5870x2 supports eyefinity. Can you use eyefinity and the CURRENT 5870 with three monitors and use the fourth port for a extended monitor. For example: When I play games I use the second monitor to have my teamspeak channel and my pc temps on. Can you use the two dvi and the dp for the three monitors to play the game and the hdmi port for the 4th extended monitor?? Thanks

Unfortunately no. The HDMI port is shared with one of the DVI's, so you can either use HDMI+DVI+Display port, or DVI+DVI+Displayport. The 6 edition is supposed to allow you to use all 6 ports at once. :)

I hope that would be available with the six port. I would really really miss not having that stuff available to me on a extended monitor. I have 3 1680x1050 one 1920 x1200 and one 1440x900 screen ready for eyefinity but will wait for the 6 port and the 5870x2 to support crossfir eyefinity before plunging in. I have a 280gtx and a 9600 gt using 4 displays now.

currently you cant span across different resolutions like you have, but you can run them seperately without using eyefinity.

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I will have three matching monitors for eyefinity and then I want one extended for other progs like teamspeak etc. I would need to get the "six then. Cannot wait for this. It will need to be a 2 gig per core and crossfire compatible. I hope its under $600 bucks. I will have to get one maybe 2 active dp adapters depending if the extended monitors need one. I have wanted to go multimonitor for awhile and was going to get a dp matrox but wanted to see what eyefinity came up with.

The 6 will still only allow a maximum of 2 dvi/hdmi connections at a time like the 3. It doesn matter if they are running in sls or just plain desktop extension, you wil still need 2 active adapters for 4 screens, if none of them has a displayport.

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah no 4 monitors at the same time, you can atleast hook up and use all 4 monitors with the card and just select the one monitor you do not want to use. This was good enough for me.

Its kinda a pain to do that though, but today I plan to try to save my monitor selections and setup to a profile and see if I can toggle them on the fly and if I can I will be 100% happy.

Back in the day with TS and Vent I always just used them running in the background so no need for them to have a screen. I can see how that would be handy though to see who is on there or to configure things without tabbing out of the game.

When you have it on its own screen doesnt that allow you to mouse out of the game though. Thats what happens to me and it always messed me up.

I cant wait to see the power/price of the 5870X2 and if it works with eyefinity I may have to ugprade to it. A single 5870 is running pretty much any game at full 5760x1200 res with no issues and thats amazing but its no 60fps and it wont hold up long if newer games increase the system demand.

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Just to check an example setup with regards the '6' card...

Assuming I had three DP monitors connected, leaving three DP outputs free, can I connect three dvi connections (accepting that two could use passive adaptors but the other would need to be an active adaptor)...?

I.e. could the '6' card theoretically drive 6 DVI/HDMI displays (assuming appropriate adaptors) or does a DVI connection tie together two tmds units, even for single link DVI resolutions?

With an active adapter the card thinks its driving a displayport panel anyway.

The problem is not the tmd's or or single/duallink connections.
The problem is the amount clock generators.

There are 2 "legacy" clock generators on the card for dvi/hdmi and 1 that can drive all the displayports.

Every dvi/hdmi connection needs a separate "legacy" clock generator, because there are only 2, you only can have 2 dvi/hdmi connections max. everything else needs to run over displayport with an active adapter (which has its own clock generator).

Correct me if I am wrong, but thats how I understood the info from the 40 pages long thread.


So for 6 dvi displays to work at the same time you need 2 passive and 4 active adapters.

And for 3 dp + 3 dvi you need 2 passive and 1 active adapter, as you wrote in your post.