Widescreen Gaming Forum

So, I recently got my eyefinity setup running. I picked up the monoprice DP-VGA adapter and flashed my bios with the sapphire bios. I definitely saw an improvement in flickering, but my VGA monitor will still occasionally flicker about once every 20-30 minutes. It's really not that big of a deal, but I'd prefer it not to happen, so now I'm debating what to do about it.

I picked up 3 21.5" monitors for my setup, and traded to those after using a 1 24" for about a year. Eyefinity is glorious but I'm noticing that watching movies does seem a little small to me now on the one middle screen. Because of this I'm now debating two options:

Should I buy the Dell P2310 and have a 21 DVI - 23 DP - 21 DVI setup (assuming that would feel big enough again for me since the 24" felt great to lay on my bed across the room and watch movies on) or should I just tolerate the 1.5" screen difference and buy an active adapter, saving myself the $100 and still fixing the flickering?

A 3rd option is to try the active adapter and then get a 4th much larger monitor to watch movies on, but if I do that I want to be able to get a 2nd 5870 in a couple months and I don't know if you can use 4 monitors with crossfire. Can anyone confirm that this is possible in extended profile?

As far as whether you should go with a native DP monitor vs. the adapter, the choice is yours. If you want to spend more money for a more stable technology, then by all means, do it. The thing to note that while a DP monitor seems to rarely flicker, for some people it does happen. So it's possible that it might not fix much.

As far as having 2x21" and a 23", I don't think you're going to like the outcome. All 3 monitors need to be the same resolution, so one being a different size will throw the perspective off, (it's really noticable with a 24" and a 19" at the same time :lol: ). If possible, I would recommend to have all the same size monitors, whether you upgrade all to a larger size, or you keep your current size.

And yes, you can get another card for a 4th extended monitor, but you will not be able to crossfire it. If you crossfire it, you will lose the extra monitors. That being said, if you aren't going to crossfire, since your computer would not benefit from the extra frames, you don't need another 5870. You can get the cheapest video card that supports the monitor inputs you have. There would be no point in getting a matching card if you aren't going to crossfire.

Depending on how many PCI-E buses you have, you can possibly crossfire and have a 3rd card just for the extra monitor outputs. I have 2 5770's and have a incoming GeForce 8400 GS just for extended monitors. But if you don't need the performance gain, there would be no reason for the go with another card like the 5870.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for your response. I was really curious if the monitor size difference would get to me. I'm gonna stick to the 21.5's and I'll just pick an active DVI adapter to test the result. Thanks again for your input! :cheers


EDIT: A thought occurs to me. Could I pick up another 5870, and set up the two profiles, extended and eyefinity, but set the profile settings in extended to not have crossfire enabled, and set the settings for eyefinity to have them enabled? Because then I could still find myself another monitor just for movies, and still do crossfire to up my fps without needing a new motherboard for another pci-e slot.

While theoretically you can do the profile thing, myself and others have found that it doesn't seem to work quite right. When going back to Eyefinity, I sometimes get the "displayport error" message, and sometimes all my monitors will be cloned instead of Eyefinity. So every time you go back and forth between Eyefinity and extended desktop prepare to have to set up everything again.

Profiles work fine for me, but maybe it's because I have a monitor with native DP.