Widescreen Gaming Forum

I currently have a i7 920 clocked at 4.0ghz and a HD5850 and a single 1920x1200 monitor.

I'm looking to upgrade to a 3 1920x1200 screens and running either Eyefinity or nVidiaa surround for a flight sim (DCS A-10C).

Should I:
1) buy one additional HD5850 and run Crossfire + Eyefinity
2) ditch the 5850, and get two 470s or 480s and run SLI + surround (I have no interest in stereoscopic 3D)

I'm wondering if the 5850s will have enough power to drive 5760x1200, and if the ATI cards still have as much trouble combining both Crossfire and Eyefinity at the same time. It seems nVidia at least works more reliably.

It seems there's hardly anyone running 5850s in crossfire and eyefinity and I was wondering if there's a good reason for this.

Thanks.

Hi

I run 5850's in crossfire in eyefinity at the resolution that your aiming for. My experience i generall has not been good, most games in eyefinity suffer from stuttering giving the feel of the game to be choppy even though the frame rate is high. I have a mate that runs a single 5850 (res 5040x1050) and he says that he doesn't get any stuttering, so it looks like it's an issue with crossfire and eyefinity. I've tried all drivers upto 10.7, found 10.4 to be the best.

I'm about to switch over to nVidia cards as I've read people coments giving good feedback, but I can't comment with actual experience in using them in surround.

Thanks. That's what I was afraid of. I was hoping to just got another 5850, hoping that ATI finally got around to fixing those Crossfire problems. But I guess that's not the case.

I guess I'll just end up getting a couple of Nvidia 480s... or simply wait until new cards come out next year since these current cards don't seem to be up to the resolution.

I have a pair of 5850's in crossfire running 5040x1080 although they work OK, the scaling for crossfire + eyefinity is about 65% (have a look over Ibrim's benchmarks to confirm this).

On the other hand my bro has got 2x470's in SLI and the tripple head works great, no messing around with DP adaptors or native display port monitors and the scaling is alot better 85%+ from the small number of banchmarks i have read.

The ATI solution also has the issue of bezel compansation, and even though i have got 3 Dell 2209WA monitors (DVI/DVI/DP-VGA) i still can't get the bezel correction to work. With the Nvidia solution it's just so much better, simpiler and cheeper (if you have 3DVI monitors already).

If your mainboard will support SLI then i would ditch the ATI cards and go strait for the 470's (they also happen to be alot faster card in there own)