Sapphire HD5770 Flex Review on 3 monitors

1. Introduction2. Sapphire HD5770 Flex Edition3. Testing Methodology4. Configuring the HD5770 Flex for 3 panels5. Far Cry 26. Left 4 Dead 27. Colin McRae Dirt 28. Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 29. Resident Evil 510. HQV Benchmark 2.011. Overclocking12. Thermal Dynamics13. Acoustics Performance14. Power Consumption15. Closing Thoughts16. View All Pages

Setting up the Sapphire HD5770 Flex graphics card is a painfree experience thanks to the excellent Catalyst 10.7 drivers, which we feel strongly are ATI's best ever drivers. Not just for gaming, but for high definition video content.

Those of you who haven't read our 43 page HQV image analysis should have a quick look before going any further.

We are going to revisit the HQV benchmark later in the review as ATI have released several  drivers since our last analysis, so it will be interesting to see if anything has improved (or gotten worse).

Firstly we would like to thank Asus, Dell and iiyama for supplying the monitors today.

The Sapphire HD5770 Flex had no problem detecting our three monitors and the initial display configuration is three cloned panels as seen above.

If all three screens are differing resolutions, for desktop productivity we recommend you run them in ‘extended' mode, which means they can operate as individual units within a three panel configuration.

For gaming however the first course of action is to ‘create a group' which merges all three screens into a SLS (Single Large Surface) environment. The added benefit of this is that the taskbar in Windows spans all monitors within this shared configuration.

The Catalyst control panel offers various solutions for different demands as can be seen in the images above. For this article however we want a single 3×1 display configuration.

Once the settings are accepted Catalyst 10.7 shows the three screens as a single entity with dotted lines between them.

We know it is hard to get a basic ‘size' overview in your head of three screens 24 inch screens side by side so we have attached a screengrab above.

It only takes a few moments, and ATI have included a fantastic support mechanism in their driver to fix mis-positioned monitors. This means if the middle screen is on the right of your desktop, you can easily move it into the central position by a blue screen configuration setting.

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