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For those that ventured into the world of Eyefinity and didn't have a Display Port ready monitor had to purchase an expensive Active Display Port adapter that often added close to $100 to the setup cost of this type of configuration. Often times even after purchasing the adapter the user would experience various problems like loss of signal to the Display Port connected monitor.
As we can imagine this would be very annoying for anyone to endure just to experience gaming across multiple displays. AMD has been hard at work trying to resolve this issue and the first example of their hard work was seen recently when our own Zardon took an in depth look at the Sapphire 5770 Flex edition graphics card. The engineers at Sapphire basically added the technology behind the new Active Single Link Display Port adapters directly to the cards PCB.
Starting in early September 2010 companies like PowerColor, XFX, and Sapphire as well as manufacturers WIESON and ACCELL will be introducing 2 new Active Single Link Display Port adapters that will enable users to connect 3 monitors with each display having a maximum resolution of 1920×1200.
These adapters have been completely redesigned to eliminate problems that plagued those that purchased the early generation of adapters. The best part of this is the price, the adapters will retail for roughly $30 and will also be supplied by certain AMD partners in the box with their new graphics cards. There are going to be 2 different adapters available, one will use a standard Display port to DVI connection while the 2nd model will feature a mini Display Port to DVI connection.
AMD provided us with a sample of these adapters and we used the standard Display Port to Single-Link DVI adapter to test the 3 monitor Eyefinity setup. The setup that I used was far from ideal as it was made up of 3 different size screens with a common resolution of 1680×1050. With our display group enabled we tested Battlefield Bad Company 2 at a resolution of 5040×1050 using an HIS HD 5870 graphics card to drive our testing configuration.
Zardon did such a fine job demonstrating how well this works during his review of the Sapphire 5770 Flex edition I suggest you go have a look at his high quality videos that do this technology some justice. I could show you my bastardized version using a 20″ Dell, a 24″ Samsung and a 26″ Acer display but it would take away from how the technology was designed to operate!
These 2 screen shots were taken during our time with BFBC2 and the gaming was very captivating even with odd display sizes. We can report that during our session we had no issue related to the adapter at all, it worked flawlessly. After further consideration I added a link to a 90 second segment from BFBC2 just so you can see that even with mixed display sizes it was still a decent experience.
I hope the greater availability of the less expensive adapters allows for more people to enjoy gaming or running multiple business applications using ATI Eyefinity technology. It's simple to setup and worked very well throughout our testing.
