The first question you might have: Why did you buy 2 of these monsters? Reason: I have 3 monitors. And not just simple monitors, but these babies:

Each has a resolution of 1920 * 1200,  which brings the total up to 6.912.000 pixels. My current HD2600XT and HD2600 PRO are simply not cutting it. I’ve got poor performance with Windows Aero and even worst with Windows Presentation Foundation. Gaming is out of the question, it simply stutters too much and I get shot dead even before I can aim… (which does not have anything to do with my gaming skills!)

So that answers the “Why?” question. Now let’s take a look at the rest. The HD4870 can be crossfired, but once you do that, you have only one monitor to work with. So what I want is that my primary monitor will do the heavy lifting (the one in the middle), and the other 2 on the sides are used with ATI Surround View. ATI’s CCC (Catalyst Control Center) is for this a big help. You can use CCC for enabling and disabling Crossfire. Simply make 2 profiles, one with Crossfire enabled and one without Crossfire and with 3 monitors enabled. Guess what the result is? Excellent performance for my programming work, and even better for gaming. Now that would be ideal, wouldn’t it? This is what I’m trying to accomplish, I’ll know if it works once my system is installed. 

The cards

When opening the box, this is what you get. Crossfire cable, power cables which you can use if you PSU doesn’t have the right connectors, a DVI2HDMI and DVI2VGA connector, Composite video cable, SVHS, a CD and a little booklet. Oh, and the video card of course ;)

The card is quite big. It will probably be the biggest video card I’ve seen, but since I’m out of the hardware business a long time now, that doesn’t say much. It uses 2 slots, one for ventilation, the other for connecting the screens.

This heat sink is no joke…

The card requires 2 PCI-E power connections.

With 1 GB of GDDR5 memory, it should make my PC considerably faster. The rest is already in place (1 Quad core 4 Ghz Proc, 8 GB memory and 2 RAID0 sets on SATA2 hard disks), this is just the final piece of the puzzle.

Next post within a few hours, with some more photos.

Thursday, May 28, 2009 8:20:22 PM (Pacific SA Standard Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]