ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Review

Eyefinity Specific Setup

As we’ve previously mentioned, as the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 is the only card that can throw 3D games onto six screens simultaneously, there’s nothing to compare it with on that count. What we can do is compare the Eyefinity 6 with its high-end HD 5000-series brethren over three screens, and that’s what we’ve done for this review.

We used three excellent NEC MultiSync EA231Wmi which not only have DisplayPort inputs, but brilliant visuals to bring our Eyefinity gaming to life. The NEC screens have the 16:9 HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 typical of many modern monitors and so we’ve focused our attention on this resolution – if the monitor world is determined to go that way, we see no reason to be different for the purposes of this article.

We chose not to use bezel correction, as this would allow us to use a resolution of exactly 5,670 x 1,080 for every test, no matter which card we used. Had we not done so, each manually defined, bezel-corrected set-up might have differed from the next in its resolution - bezel correction forces the PC to render and draw the pixels behind the bezels to produce the desired effect of looking through a paned window. If you want to read more about setting up Eyefinity, read our six-screen Eyefinity preview.

How we tested

As always, we did our best to deliver a clean set of benchmarks, with each test repeated three times and an average of those results is what we’re reporting here. In the rare case where performance was inconsistent, we continued repeating the test until we got three results that were consistent.

The tests performed are a mixture of custom in-game timedemos and manually played sections, using FRAPS to record the minimum and average frame rates. We strive to not only record real-world performance you will actually see, but also present the results in a manner that is easy to digest.

Intel Core i7 Test System

• Intel Core i7-965 processor (3.2GHz: 133MHz x 24)
  
• Asus P6T V2 motherboard (Intel X58 Express with three 16x PCI-Express 2.0 slots)
  
• 3x 2GB Corsair TR3X6G1333C9 memory modules (operating in triple-channel at DDR3 1,600MHz 9-9-9-24-1T)
  
• Corsair X128 120GB SSD running v1 firmware
  
• Corsair HX1000W PSU
  
• Windows 7 Home Premium x64
  
• Antec Twelve Hundred chassis

ATI graphics cards

• AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 (850MHz GPU, 4.8GHz memory) using Catalyst 10.3a Preview
  
• AMD ATI Radeon HD 5970 2GB (725MHz GPU, 4GHz memory) using Catalyst 10.3 WHQL
  
• AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB (850MHz GPU, 4.8GHz memory) using Catalyst 10.3 WHQL

Games Tested

• Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (DX11)
  
• STALKER: Call of Pripyat (DX11)
  
• Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising (DX10)
  
• Crysis (DX10, Very High)
  
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (DX11)