Hi.

I just have to slightly vent about the somewhat misleading specifications of graphics card manufacturers.

My main CAD box drives five 24 inch monitors, and I was using three single slot ATI HD3850 dial DVI card for this purpose. Over the last few months I have both been getting annoyed by the noise of the fans, and having occasional lock-ups when running one specific cad package which is heavy on graphics. It seems to be a slightly faulty card.

I thought I would kill two stones with one bird, and replace the existing cards with newer, ideally passively cooled ones with more outputs. After some searching around, I narrowed it down to either the XFX HD-577X-Z5FH with five mini-displayport outputs, or the XFX HD-657X-ZNH3 with two DVI and one mini-HDMI port. Both cards are sold as single slot, which would also free up one PCI-e x16 slot on my motherboard, which is a bonus.

The former card, while fan cooled, would seem to do everything in one card, while the latter one would require two, but would be silent. The price for either option was about the same, approximately £100. After a little more research, I opted for the 6570 cards as it turned out that the 5 active mini-displayport adapters required for the 5770 card to connect to the DVI monitors would add another £100 to the bill.

So, when the cards finally arrived (they were in stock when I placed the order and it was accepted, and magically out of stock when it came to ship it ) I excitedly opened the box, like a small child on chrismas day. Unfortunately, my inner small child was somewhat irritated to find that the single-slottedness of the cards didn't extend to the actual dimensions, as the heatsink fills the slot next to the card completely. Annoying, as this actually reduces the available slots by one, covering the sole remaining PCI slot.

However, not one to give up too easily, I pressed on, installed the two new cards in place of the three old ones, and fired everything up. MUCH quieter! Very pleased, I installed the drivers, and then spent a very frustrating hour trying to get the bloody machine to run more than four monitors.

After a lot of fiddling, and more poking around on google, I have realised that the graphics card manufacturers, THEY LIE!! Or at least mislead considerably. The cards do indeed have three video outputs, two DVI and one mini-hdmi. AMD's data on the 6570 claims it will indeed run three video outputs at once.

What no-one actually mentions is that this doesn't apply to most cards. These ones, for example, will detect three monitors connected to the three outputs, but will only let you have any two of those active at any given moment. What the hell is the point of that! If I see three video ports I don't consider it too much of a leap of faith to expect that I can connect three monitors to them, and reasonably expect them to do something useful.

So, mixed results. Nice and quiet, but not what I actually needed in one or two fairly critical places. I ended up putting one of the HD3850 cards back in to get the other video output required, which means that I now have all three PCI-e slots full, AND have lost my last PCI slots. The machine is admittedly considerably quieter, and hopefully won't die intermittently, but still...

Oh well, live and learn.

pca