AMD Eyefinity Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅11-08-14
What you will need

First and foremost you should consider what your use for Eyefinity will be. While our review focuses on gaming, you may simply need to increase your desktop real estate so to this end you will not need a very powerful GPU, just one which can support multiple screens. What you will need is an AMD branded card from the 5000 series upwards. You will also (obviously) require monitors.

Many gamers though may simply add further screens to old existing ones or indeed add old screens that are gathering dust to their shiny new ones. The good news here is that the screen sizes do not have to match. Obviously it will look a little odd having three (or even 6!) different screen sizes together but the end result will be that the overall image will be processed the same, giving you a bigger picture as most common resolutions cater for.

Matching the monitors to your graphics cards performance is a decision which will either make or break your Eyefinity setup. The choice is pretty much limitless, especially now AMD afford the luxury or mixing and matching screen sizes so your decision will depend greatly on your requirements and existing inventory. If you are looking to game on 3+ screens with the settings dialled up you will clearly need a powerful graphics card. If you are looking at at investing into the latest 4K technology you will most certainly require the most powerful card from the range (Radeon 295x2) to get anywhere near respectable FPS. Going for multiple 'common' monitors with common resolutions used such as 3x 1920x1080p, will still require some beefy GPU performance. ALL of AMDs mid-high range cards are Eyefinity compatible these days but you would do well to consider that you will need to strike a balance between the performance of the card and the performance output required. Less we forget, a resolution of 6400x1080 is a huge amount of pixels to render and hardly what can be described as your average resolution! We chose the R9-290X as our test subject as while it isn't the performance leader, (that falls to the R9-295X2), it should have ample power to accommodate our needs.




Adaptors and Dongles
Do you need then? This depends entirely on the amount of screens and/or the type of ports available on those screens compared to the output ports on the GPU. The most common port is the VGA port, next to the now widely used DVI. Then consider HDMI and DisplayPort. Most modern screens will have a combination of these ports negating the need for additional dongles and adaptors so it is worth researching what ports your prospective screens use before purchasing. Inevitably, older screens may require additional adaptors to be purchased should they not have the required port.



Review Setup
First, the basics: Like you, we love the feeling when we hit the 'buy now' button and eagerly await delivery of your shiny new hardware. It is however easy to overlook the small but important preparation required for Eyefinity. Before you even begin to consider where to place the monitors you will need to ensure you have the means to power them. By this I mean the inevitable use of power extension sockets. With surge protection now much cheaper than yesteryear it wouldn't make sense to buy a cheap extension lead. It is vitally important you do not overload a socket so please bear this in mind when you are hooking all of your PC equipment to one socket! Next you will need to consider where your PC will be positioned in relation to your chosen area for the screens. We say this because most monitor screens (if you are lucky) will only come supplied with a VGA or DVI cable and even then they are rarely longer than 1.5M long which could prove troublesome if your PC is in such a position that requires longer leads than this or indeed you do not want to hook your monitors up via DVI and prefer DisplayPort instead in which case you will likely need to purchase additional cables. So while you are buying new cables it may be worth investing in some 3m cables for flexibility.

For our setup we used an R9-290X GPU that has the standard array of ports found on most mid/high range AMD GPUs including twin DVI ports, a HDMI port and a display port. Some GPU's will have more or less than this compliment of ports which will have a large bearing on what dongles/adaptors/cables you will require. For example the R9-295x2 has a single DVI port but four mini Display ports and thus ideally you would want all three monitors to have DisplayPort functionality. Most GPU's come supplied with basic adaptors such as VGA to DVI adaptor and maybe DVI to HDMI but few have HDMI-DisplayPort so it is worth checking that what you have available is what will be required and therefore will be compatible with your chosen monitors. We would certainly advocate using the same ports where possible for ease of use but for most of us this is not possible, especially if you are using different monitors from different manufacturers (as in our case) which will invariably have a different selection of ports from one manufacturer to another hence why we chose to use the R9-290X. We opted to use both DVI ports on the R9-290X along with HDMI which we connected up to the screens without any issues save for cable length (again, something worth checking). We did find that one of the screens was not detected until Windows had fully booted up while the other two screens showed the boot process so it is worth waiting until you’re in windows with the driver fully installed before problem solving.

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