I'm helping someone plan a new PC and he wants to go with dual-monitors on two Radeon HD 5870 cards in crossfire. Someone mentioned I would need 3 video cards in crossfire if I want to do dual-monitors. Is that true, or was that an old limitation due to the cable-dongles that used to be required?
~AnakiMana
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AFAIK... no.... You can run two monitors off of one 5870..... You would have to look into the ati eyefinity to run games on both monitors.... (I gather it is for games)....
Having a quick read around... Looks like the 5870 will support 6 monitors... they also do a 5870 eyefinity edition, which has 6 display ports...
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Actually, he doesn't play games, but wants to get into high-end graphics work. I told him he doesn't need crossfire/SLI unless he is going to be pushing for high-frames/sec like in gaming. But he is a bit of an enthusiast and money isn't a problem. He has read about the benefit of crossfire and has made up his mind. He's looking at this card: Gigabyte GV-R587D5-1GD-B.
So if I crossfire these, could I plug each of his monitors into the HDMI port on each card? Or would I need to use only the ports on the first card? I've not crossfired before.
But in my SLI setup I have one monitor in the back of each card.... (so I gather it will work for the ATI cards)
All I can say is it is a waste to get a multi GPU rig for video editing... (Unless the software takes adavantage of the gpu's).... Just pick up one 5870 and get a good I7 920 D0 and a good cpu cooler and clock it to 4.0ghz....
What kind of monitors does he have?
He can do dual monitors with crossfire I'm almost sure. I'm not sure how that works as far as the gaming aspect. I imagine if the game supports it he could do large resolutions fine.
I know you can do up to 3 monitors per 58xx series card. But one monitor has to have a display port, the other 2 can run on DVI connections.
he hasn't a clue then, Crossfire will only be beneficial for gaming, and some really high end extreme graphics/animation work.
it'll even be more of a waste if the programs he uses don't utilize GPU Final Renderings, most programs allow the GPU to render previews of renders, but for the final output, not all programs use the GPU, mainly only the high end big names lik Maya, 3D Studio Max, Cinema4D or programs like that.
but yes, if you Crossfired those two together, you should be able to use 2 displays one per card... I think, could be 2 on the main card, might have to experiment to find out, as I've never dabbled in that my self.
I'm not sure how well it works, but it was well over a year ago that ATI enabled Multi Monitor support when running Crossfire. Unlike SLI, which as far as I know still doesn't support multi monitors in SLI Mode.
Question is, what kind of CPU is he pairing with these two cards? hopefully its a single high end Quad core at least.
Well its not just the vid cards that don't make sense.. spending a grand on a cpu doesn't either... a 920 overclocked will yeild better performance... for a fith of the cost but if the monitors are over 2k each I guess they have way too much money to spend....
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