Red vs Green vs Blue - The Test Rigs

To make the test as fair as possible, I bought exactly the same CPU (Intel i5-2500K) and RAM (G-Skill 8GB Dual channel DDR3-1600 RipjawsX). At the time I built my Eyefinity rig, I was not planning on doing this, so I did not consider SLI compatibility. So for my Nvidia rig, I tried to spec the motherboard as close as possible with what was available to me (ASUS P8P67 Pro V3 B3 Stepping vs ASUS P8Z68-V-GEN3). I just wanted to make sure I had dual channel 8x PCI for SLI support.

Both i5-2500Ks were overclocked using the ASUS advanced graphical BIOS from the stock speed of 3.3GHz up to 4.0GHz on the stock cooler. Both rigs have 850W power supplies and Windows 7 Home 64-bit installed. All background programs were turned off (as far as I could tell) to reduce variables. Both rigs were connected to my 3 x 1680x1050 16:10 DVI monitors, Logitech G15 Keyboard and G5 mouse. Both rigs benchmarked the same so I was satisfied that I had parity for this exercise.

So now I had my two test rig base setups sorted, it was time to look at graphical hardware.

Red vs Green vs Blue - Graphical Hardware

So let's look at the different solutions and how much they cost me.

Australia

With my Eyefinity setup, the Sapphire HD6950 2GB cost me $350. I bought the Sapphire for its extra cooling abilities over the more budget cards as these suckers run hot. Now you can get these cards for around $320 here. For the active adapter, I had one from my previous Eyefinity build, which cost me $120 at the time. You can get them a bit cheaper now, although the Accell active adapter still costs $90 here. Our local market prices are ridiculous compared to the US. So together, the pair came to $470, although today it would cost $410 here for the pair, which is the figure I will use.

A Triplehead2Go Digital Edition still costs $400 here, and I still had to purchase a GPU. I was planning in testing the TH2G with the HD6950, but the Triplehead2Go does not support 5040x1050 on AMD cards. I couldn't afford to buy an independent Nvidia card to test this, so I used the 2 x GTX560 2GB SLI setup in the Nvidia rig to give me comparable graphical performance. That ends up as $890 worth of equipment.

On the Nvidia side, I assessed 2 x Palit GTX560 2GB cards as the best value setup that I could afford. They were $245 each, so the pair came in at $490.

Bear in mind the prices are in Australian dollars and based on our local market pricing, which is highway robbery.

USA

Based on newegg.com pricing, Americans would pay the following:
- Sapphire HD6950 2GB $280, Accell active adapter $46; Total $326
- Galaxy GTX560 2GB $220x2; Total $440 (newegg don't have the Palit price listed due to out-of-stock, so it's an equivelant alternative)
- Matrox Triplehead2Go $300, Galaxy GTX560 2GB $220x2: $440; Total $740

The total cost of hardware for me in Australia was $1300, while if I was in America it would cost me $1046 if I shopped through newegg.com. Bearing in mind that the Australian dollar is stronger than the US dollar at the moment, it's an outrage. But I move on...

So let me make one thing clear straight away. The Triplehead2Go setup is expensive, any way you look at it. Only half of the dollars you are putting are going towards GPU grunt. Do the features it offers make it worth the money?

The Nvidia Surround rig comes in second place cost-wise. It's simple and clean, no external adapters or boxes to worry about, and 100% of your dollars go towards GPU grunt.

In Australia, with the Eyefinity setup, you're still putting almost a quarter of your cash into non-GPU items (active adaptor), though that ratio comes down somewhat in America. If you had DisplayPort monitors, this wouldn’t be an issue, but many of us don’t. Regardless, the Eyefinity setup is the most affordable to get into of this lot.

So how do they perform?

Red vs Green vs Blue - Benchmark Software

First of all, I was keen to run benchmarking software over all the possible setup combinations to see how they performed, so they could be compared to each other and their respective setup costs. I chose Futuremark 3D Vantage, as I have used this before successfully and it tells me how the systems are performing compared to expected results. This runs at a set resolution of 1280x1024 regardless of your monitor setup. The software looks at your hardware profile and sets a target score that it expects your system to achieve, so you can assess how healthy your system is.

The first thing that immediately stood out to me was the lack of performance when launching the benchmark software from Nvidia Surround. It performed extremely poorly compared to when it was launched from a single monitor desktop on the same computer. I was curious to see if this translated to the same results in game.

The TH2G performed just as well when compared to the equivalent systems, but did not suffer when launched from a multi-monitor desktop when using the Nvidia card in the same way that Nvidia Surround did.

My Eyefinity rig performed worse than the Nvidia counterparts, but the difference in cost will be factored in when assessing this. While I could setup the TH2G on the AMD card with a triple monitor resolution of 3840x800 and benchmark it here, the combination does not allow my native resolution of 5040x1050 and as such was not evaluated any further in this comparison.

Do these results translate into real-world figures?

Red vs Green vs Blue - Game Benchmarks

The first thing I wanted to test was the anomaly that I saw during benchmarking, where the Nvidia rig performed poorly when running a single-monitor fullscreen application while in Nvidia Surround.

I ran benchmarks on DiRT3 using both High and Ultra presets, and HAWX2 both with and without Terrain Tessellation. I tried running from a single monitor desktop, a 3-screen Nvidia Surround desktop, and also a 3-screen Extended Desktop.

You can clearly see that the system does not perform the same when launching a game at 1680x1050 from Nvidia Surround as a single-monitor desktop. This is a major flaw for Nvidia Surround as it means you need to change to a single monitor desktop every time you want to run a single monitor fullscreen application at full performance. While I cannot explain this anomaly, I can explain that the extended desktop performs much worse because you cannot have SLI enabled with an extended desktop. I was just curious to see how the three options performed.

From there, I ran the same benchmarks across all 3 systems (remembering that the TH2G with the AMD card was eliminated from this comparison as it cannot support a resolution of 5040x1050). DiRT3 was run in both the High and Ultra presets, and HAWX2 was run at max everything both with and without Terrain Tessellation.

I find it fascinating that the Triplehead2Go on the Nvidia rig performs better than Nvidia Surround does. I can't explain that one, as MSI Afterburner reported both were running DirectX11. It's a fairly noticeable gain at the 5040x1050 resolution.

It's not a huge surprise to me to see that the Eyefinity system performs worse than the Nvidia Surround system because it was cheaper to buy. But does it perform worse than the difference in cost compared to the Nvidia Surround rig?

I did some cost-per-performance-indicator comparisons to see how much money you need to spend to get the same thing - in other words, the value you get.

So in the graphs above, you can see how much money it costs to get 500 P-scores in benchmarking, or how much each Frame Per Second in DiRT3 and HAWX2 costs.

Despite being the cheapest system to setup, the Eyefinity solution tested here is actually less cost-effective in games than the Nvidia rig. This means that the Nvidia rig performed better than the increase in cost, meaning it is a better value-for-money system. In fact, despite costing twice as much as the Eyefinity rig, the Triplehead2Go performed so well that they were on par for value, but only in regards to the HAWX2 benchmark.

I want to stress that these results would change depending on how video card prices change and what your local market has to offer.

So from the comparison so far, the things that have stood out to me are:
- Nvidia Surround's lack of performance when running single monitor fullscreen applications
- The Triplehead2Go outperformed Nvidia Surround on the same video cards, most notably at larger resolutions

Now I want to take a look at how easy it is to live with each system, what flaws they have, and where they shine.

Red vs Green vs Blue - Physical Equipment

I have divided up the ownership and use of each system into Feature areas. I am not going to make any category any more or less important than another, because what is important for me may not be important for you, and vice versa. It should give us an indication of how the setups generally stack up compared to the others, but each may have a deal-breaker for your particular application.

I have summarised all these features on the CheatSheet at the end of the article in the Conclusion.

So let's begin.

Physical Equipment

The Triplehead2Go setup is by far the messiest. You have to locate an extra box somewhere with two cables going to it from the PC, plus you have to be careful with the short dual-link DVI cable as Matrox stress that any damage or kinks can cause performance issues, as they run the cable to its maximum capability. You also lose a USB port to connect the Triplehead2Go box to the PC.

The Eyefinity setup is next, with an active adapter hanging off the Eyefinity card. My old style adapter is very messy and has a second cable to plug into the USB, although newer adapters appear not to need this. In general, the cabling is not as neat as the Nvidia Surround regardless of what adapter you use. The other issue with the new Eyefinity cards is that they are MASSIVE and they seem to keep growing. The HD6950 is even about 20% longer than my old HD5850. This presents a real problem in smaller cases, and even in my large case, required shuffling of hard drives to fit in. It's a pain.

The Nvidia Surround setup is clean. 3 DVI cables straight into the two DVI slots on the first card and first DVI slot on the second card. The cards are average in size, and fitting two into the case was Easy with a capital E.

VRAM

This is something worth discussing straight away. Multi-monitor setups need VRAM, and lots of it. As much as possible, in fact. If you are planning on running a multi-monitor setup of any kind, get the most amount of VRAM you can afford.

In both systems, I bought the 2GB cards. Because the Nvidia Surround setup has two cards with 2GB VRAM, you may be inclined to think that the system has 4GB overall and therefore twice as much as the Eyefinity system, but it doesn't work like that. The cards are limited to the smallest VRAM of any card, as the data in memory needs to be mirrored across both cards, not spanned. So make sure you buy two cards the same, preferably with 2GB or higher.

In my test cases here, both systems have 2GB VRAM available to them, and so does the TH2G when it is connected to them.

Red vs Green vs Blue - Software Reliability

Reliability

So far, I have not had an issue with my Nvidia Surround setup. Setting up the surround configuration was super easy. I never had problems with monitor identification. It was a pleasure. Obviously this is not always the case for all people or else we wouldn't have a forum dedicated to issues surrounding this (no pun intended). But for me, with the same computer setups and just changing the graphical hardware, Nvidia was the simplest of the lot.

In my experience, the Matrox Triplehead2Go and PowerDesk / SGU software is reliable. I have built 5 systems for people using it with Nvidia cards and I have never had to reinstall a driver or anything. It just works.

However, the story is not so good on AMD systems. Although the PowerDesk would let me select 3x1680x1050, it would always fail on the required computer restart without telling me that the maximum resolution on AMD cards is actually 3x1280x1024. Either it should tell you this in the error, or better still, not let you select it to begin with. Once I had learned this limitation through some searching, it performed reliably for me after that.

If you look up the word Reliability in the dictionary, you won’t find the Eyefinity Catalyst Control Center. Especially early on when Eyefinity was new, I had driver issues - lots of them. I could not even choose the Restart option in Windows because my Eyefinity configuration would be all messed up after the reboot. I also could not change back to a single screen or it would Blue Screen Of Death. However, the drivers have come a long way. I can now Restart reliably, and once the Catalyst Control Center recognises my DisplayPort-to-DVI monitor (which has required hot-unplugging and replugging at times), I can setup up an Eyefinity group.

Lots of people have problems with the active adapters needed to make Eyefinity work. Some brand / combinations have screen flicker issues and the like. I know it's not really AMD's problem, but it's a little bit of hope and pray that it won't happen to you. It's something that you don't need to worry about with the other setups. Even during testing for this comparison, after swapping the rigs around, the Eyefinity rig booted with a corrupted display setup on the monitor using the active adapter. I also had great difficulties getting the Eyefinity 2.0 Catalyst Control Center to even run at all.

Another difficulty with Eyefinity is setting which monitor the system reverts to when you return to a single monitor mode (by using Windows-P and choosing Computer Only, for example). This is very easy on the Nvidia rig, just have the central monitor plugged into the first DVI connector on the first video card and you're set. Same with the Triplehead2Go, just plug it into the DVI connector with the Center monitor highlighted on the picture. With Eyefinity, you must battle the Catalyst Control Center - there don't seem to be any hard and fast rules that work for everyone. So while I love my Eyefinity rig dearly, the drivers are absymal. I don’t believe you should have to fear updating to a new driver.

Windows-P is a great trick for switching between Eyefinity or Nvidia Surround and a single monitor desktop. Press Windows-P to bring up the menu. Choose 'Computer Only' for a single monitor desktop or 'Duplicate' for Nvidia Surround and Eyefinity. I have found it to be reliable on all systems and drivers I have tried it on.

Red vs Green vs Blue - Bezel Correction

Bezel Correction

The Eyefinity and Nvidia Surround rig do bezel correction in the same way. They make a new resolution higher than the non-corrected resolution, so that the extra pixels can sit behind your bezels. For example, on my Eyefinity rig, my non-bezel corrected resolution is 5040x1050, but my bezel corrected resolution is 5292x1050. This is great in one sense, because the monitors are full of in-game picture, but is painful as your mouse disappears behind the bezels. Sometimes menu items are located behind the bezels (Payday The Heist comes to mind); you just have to guess where your mouse is.

The Triplehead2Go does things differently. For its bezel correction, it keeps the same desktop resolution, but simply moves the outside monitors’ images inwards. This means that the outside inch or so of your outside monitors is blank! Another downside is that I could not get the bezel management to remain enabled after a shutdown or reboot. It's not a huge deal, but it would be nice if you could choose to leave it set by default. The upside is that you get a hotkey to turn the correction on or off instantly. This means that when you want to just work on your desktop without your mouse disappearing, or you need to access an option in game that is behind your bezel, you can quickly hotkey it off, and hotkey it back on whenever you like.

Why can't we have the best of both worlds! Each has positives and weaknesses.

Red vs Green vs Blue - How they handle 3 screens

Startup screens

Ok, so this is a very minor point here, but I do like attention to detail. To me, it's a quality thing. When the BIOS and Windows loading screens are shown, Nvidia Surround keep the outside monitors disabled so the screens only appear on the center monitor. The Triplehead2Go displays the BIOS and startup screens on just the center monitor, like Nvidia Surround, regardless of what brand GPU you use. This is the way I would expect it to be. Eyefinity duplicates it on two monitors for some reason, and leaves the third blank. This gets annoying when you are navigating around the BIOS during overclocking, I end up turning the second monitor off.

Single Monitor Fullscreen Applications

Another attention to detail issue is what happens when I choose to run a fullscreen program that is set to a single monitor resolution, while I am in a multi-monitor configuration.

Eyefinity simply duplicates the application on all 3 screens, forcing you to manually turn off the two outside monitors to avoid going crazy, especially if it's a game. It runs at full performance, however.

Nvidia Surround gets halfway there and then shoots itself in the foot. It disables the outside monitor connected to the second video card, which is great as the monitor turns off. But for the outside monitor that is connected to the second video output of the first card, the image is simply blanked. The result is that the monitor does not turn off, rather it stays backlit but black. Doesn't sound like a big deal, but when gaming at night in a dimmed room, it's distracting. I find I still turn that monitor off manually. However, that's not the killer. The worst part is that the performance of the system drops by about 1/3 when single monitor fullscreen applications are run from a multi-monitor desktop! Why!?!

The TH2G turns off both outside monitors and just runs the application in the center monitor. Gold.

Maximising windows

Matrox's PowerDesk software allows windows to be maximised to an individual screen, as the software divides the single large surface up into three sections on the desktop.

Unfortunately, Eyefinity and Nvidia Surround don't. Both see the whole desktop as a single large surface, and as such, when a window is maximised, it maximises across all 3 monitors. This is frustrating as you cannot maximise a window to just one screen, you must manually resize it yourself.

Now there are programs out there that can be configured to do what the Matrox software does, such as HydraGrid by AMD and Ultramon, but they are not native to the setup. Some people I know who use Eyefinity change to an extended desktop for working, and switch to Eyefinity just for gaming, to get around this problem.

Red vs Green vs Blue - Extras

Extras

One nice thing about the Nvidia setup is PhysX. While it's not a deal-breaker, it is a nice to have. If you are using an Nvidia card with your Triplehead2Go, you will enjoy this, whereas you will not if using an AMD card.

The Triplehead2Go has some unpleasant quirks. For instance, some games such as DiRT3 don't recognise that it is a multi-monitor setup, so your nicely centered HUD isn't centered at all - it's spanned. That sucks! At first I suspected the game may have been running in DX9 which was causing the spanned HUD, but MSI Afterburner confirmed that the game was actually running in DX11, so it’s an issue when using the Triplehead2Go.

Screen tearing is something that seems to affect the Eyefinity setups pretty badly. There are always threads about it in the Eyefinity forum. The easiest way to test this is to grab a window (like the Steam main window or a Windows folder with pictures in it) and drag it around your monitors. If your system has tearing, you'll notice the window that you are moving has a split in it somewhere. Usually this will only happen on one or two monitors and will happen in game also. For me, it happens on my two outside monitors (connected by DVI). It's pretty noticeable on my system if you are looking for it.

On a bright note for AMD users, the update to Eyefinity 2.0 introduces the ability to natively move your taskbar. In this example, I have it set to the center monitor. Bezel correction does not hide the edges of it either, it takes that into account.

Just for the curious, the Triplehead2Go seems immune to tearing when using the same AMD card that did have tearing in Eyefinity. What is interesting is that the connection to the TH2G is using the same connection that goes to an outside monitor in Eyefinity that experiences tearing.

Red vs Green vs Blue - Resolution Support

Resolution Support

Eyefinity and Nvidia Surround are extremely flexible systems, able to handle any mainstream monitors natively at the frequency required. Obviously, the higher the resolution, the worse the performance will be, but both setups will work.

Eyefinity can support a greater range of monitor setups than Nvidia Surround, but I am only testing 3x1L here which all 3 systems support, so I don't have any extra data to add to this.

The Matrox Triplehead2Go is limited to 5040x1050 at 59/60Hz (the site says 60Hz but has a disclaimer to say it may actually be 59Hz, which it is for me) or 5760x1080 at 50Hz.

To understand why this is, you have to understand the Matrox setup. It only uses one video output from your graphics card to source the whole image and a USB cable to control the box. You then plug 3 monitors into the Triplehead2Go box. The dual-link DVI connection on the box and your graphics card has a limited bandwidth of just 7.92Gbit/s, and at these resolutions it is absolutely maxed out. In fact, from what I have researched, it appears that it can only support 57Hz at 5040x1050 and the last 2 frames per second are sent via the USB cable.

This is not a huge problem for 3 x 1680x1050 monitors as nearly all of these monitors will support 59Hz, but it is a problem for 3 x 1920x1080 users as not all monitors will support 50Hz. And if you use larger monitors like 1920x1200, then forget it.

Red vs Green vs Blue - Conclusion

So which is the best setup to go for?

I've drawn up a CheatSheet that looks at the Pros and Cons of each setup. This should help people assess the different setups to the others, as what I see as unimportant may be a deal-breaker to you. As with all the images, click on it to bring up a larger version. If you are not sure what I mean by something, refer back to the page in this article that talks about it.

I wish I could make a mash-up of the different systems.

I love the way the Triplehead2Go handles maximising windows and the turning off the outside monitors when running a single monitor fullscreen application, but I can’t stand the breaking of some in-game elements like centered HUDs and it’s expensive. I love Eyefinity’s customization of the desktop, but the troublesome drivers are painful, the tearing isn’t great, and the duplication of single monitor fullscreen games on all 3 monitors sucks. I love Nvidia Surround’s clean setup and reliable drivers, but SLI is troublesome on some games and the large drop in performance when running a single monitor fullscreen game is beyond comprehension.

So what do I think, after 3 weeks of comparisons? So hard to say.

My gut feeling is to buy the biggest baddest Eyefinity card you can, pray that the drivers install ok, live with its flaws and enjoy the good times. Even if it is not as good value as the Nvidia setup and it's painful to setup, once it's going you don't have to worry changing to a single monitor desktop to run single monitor fullscreen applications and you don't have to worry about SLI support in games. To me, it’s the best of 3 imperfect setups.

If you’re looking to buy a triple-monitor setup, I hope you found this article useful in making your decision. Cheers!