Reviews - ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition review: AMD hits one for six

£100-£150 (based on OcUK prices) is a hell of a premium over a standard (albeit 1GB) 5870!

The people who buy these aren't going to be intimidated by cost though. They're going to want to fork out for at least 3 decent-sized monitors on top of that, and probably not 22" ones like Hexus used. It's hardly for your average gamer. Probably a bit of the usual early milking that goes on too.

In the review I noticed you had an issue with maximising screens on an Eyefinity 6 setup as the bezels got in the way but there is a nifty little feature in ATI Catalyst called HydraGrid that effectively allows you to draw on the outlines of your screens as a grid and then use them as snap-to or maximising areas... just an idea ;)

It's neat, I'll give it that, but I'd really not sure about the decision to support only two 'legacy' monitors.

All the current generation of ATI's cards support three monitors, of which one has to be a displayport, or use an active displayport adaptor (about 70 quid).

If the motherboard in use has spare slots, it may be more sensible to run two 5850s. You still get six connections, four of which can be legacy monitors. The downsides are extra heat and power and (probably) the lack of a seamless single display surface across the two cards.. The 5850 is slightly slower, but then again, if you ran it in xfire you could get higher performance than the 5870 on some of your monitors (the others are disabled whilst in xfire, I believe).

So, yes, it's good, but only if you really need 3D acceleration on all your monitors in a seamless display space.

As for power consumption at idle, did you compare the Eyefinity card running 3 and 6 monitors to a regular card running only one? Surely it would make more sense to compare it to regular card running three/Eyefinity running one, so you can compare power usage directly :)

I have to admit, it isn't fair to slag off nvidia for how gimmicky and needless PhysX and 3D Vision are, without also commenting on how gimmicky Eyefinity is. Unlike PhysX, it will always have a market, but it's not going to be that widespread because simply put, Eyefinity just isn't compatible with all genres of games. In racers it works reasonably well, in strategy games it works superbly. In first person shooters, it's going to be extremely annoying until there are no bezels at all. For the money involved, unless you solely play strategy games, you're better off going with a single 30" monitor and have done with it. It's so much easier, no awkward setup, only a single video cable required, less graphics power required, no bezels, etc.
The HD5870 2GB Eyefinity6 cards are currently £400-£440. That's about the same price as a GTX480, just under. Seems perfectly legitimate to ask that price if you ask me. Here's just hoping that doesn't mean the HD5970 4GB Eyefinity 6 will cost £800-£880 :S

Hi

does the HD 5870 only really support 2 legacy monitors or can you just add the right additional adapter to add more VGA monitors?

I have an F16 cockpit and I require at least 6 VGA outputs! Viperpits rule!

You can theoretically use displayport adapters for all the ports, but I don't think it will actually work in Eyefinity if you do that, you'd be better off with a pair of TripleHead2Gos.