AMD's Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 31, 2010 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Completing the Eyefinity 6 Build
Just when we thought we were good to go with the first four panels, we heard a loud snap and a whole lot of bad ensued. The tape we applied earlier made it look like the panels were happily resting against one another but in reality it was just barely holding together a contraption that did not want to be contained any longer.
Apparently we hadn't adjusted all of the mounts properly and eventually the tape gave way (hence it not being magic sticky tape):
Here we have AMD's Chris Hook holding two panels together while I tighten the mounts to hopefully keep them in place. I believe I'm telling him a funny story at this point as well.
Setting up one of these Eyefinity 6 builds is definitely a two person job, and I wouldn't shy away from having a third join in. It definitely helped us.
Luckily Atdec's two display stand was much easier to assemble. You just adjust the vertical position of the arms that will hold your two displays, and with that done just clamp them into place. We lined up the two remaining displays to our slanty 4 monitor setup and things started to come together:
The whole process took a couple of hours. It would've taken more if we cared about trying to get all of the bezels to line up perfectly. If you've got a friend (or ten) who have great attention to detail and are extremely patient with assembling things, invite them over to help setup your $1500 Eyefinity 6 display (you should probably bake them a cake).
The finished product definitely had issues. The tape didn't keep the panels together forever. I will say that the gaps between the bezels didn't bother me that much, although the combined thickness of two bezels was annoying when actually using the system.
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cfaalm - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Why don't AMD go talk to display manufactureres to thin out or even totally forego any bezels on Eyefinity compatible displays? In other dual/multiple screen situations than Eyefinity it can still be desirable to have real thin or no bezels, so it won't be that far out.Aclough - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
They're working on them now, but they aren't out yet. Be warned that they'll probably cost more than normal monitors though.cfaalm - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
I expected they would cost a bit more. Though I don't have any figures on the premium I guess it would be worth it compared to what gains can be had it these special situations where you'd be spending a small fortune anyway.mjrpes3 - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
It's greatly in their interest to develop this technology: lowering the barrier and increasing the incentive to buy 3x or 6x quantity of a product.Calin - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
Sell more cheap monitors instead of fewer expensive monitors? I don't think so.Calin - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
The bezels are there with a purpose (strength, if nothing else).There are monitors with thin bezels - what we might need now could be pre-built monitors in 6x configuration, reducing as much as possible the bezel size (they could do it better in the factory). Maybe some boutique industry could spring from this? Something like the tuning shops in the auto industry
behrouz - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Hi Anand.this is very beautiful and the logo at top of page is better than previous logo.
good luck.
Manuel1975 - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Does anybody know if there will be any mac drivers? This would be a formidable beast in combination with MacPro and Mediaserver Software...erple2 - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
I think that this tech would be wasted on a Media Server implementation. Unless you're talking about something different than what I'm thinking of. Streaming media to these devices would be essentially pointless, as few, if any, media is available at any resolution beyond 1080p.Putting it on a Mac makes even less sense, given that what makes this unique is the ability to run solid 3D games titles. And last I checked, there were few, if any, 3D games available on the Mac Platform.
While Apple does offer multiple graphics cards in their MacPro systems, they're generally very low-end graphics products (currently NVidia GeForce GT 120 based), meant to drive CAD or other non-3D gaming applications. Those can easily handle any Media server load you could throw at it. I suppose you could make the argument that it could upscale the video to 2160p (doubling 1080p), but that seems to be pointless to me - just run a larger 1080p projector.
Manuel1975 - Tuesday, August 3, 2010 - link
Hi Erple,The media I use to drive multiple dipslays normaly reqiure something along the range of 640x480 to a 4k type of resolution. Although these high resolutions are not mainstream, Youtube for instance does alow you to upload videos in 4k resolution. The future of HD+ video is very very near.
And nowadays OSX ships with something called quartz composer. This something you can compare with prosessing. Its OpenGL bases image synthesis. Truely amazing stuf: 4k+ resolutions rendered at 60hz. Eazely.
Tip for your next post: try to think outside your box before posting.