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

Did you look into Displaylink gear? Or wouldn't that deal with the CAD package? (It deals with 3D games ok.)

Peter

I absolutely hate the size of the new cards. The heat sinks are just incredibly massive and the length of the cards are just getting stupid. I lost two of my internal SATA ports because of the ignorant design of the mainboard puts the video card right over last two in the row.

One other possible option are the USB->video adaptors now out in the marketplace. They generally work with Linux, and MS stuff, and possibly also Macs (?). I know they'll do at least 1920x1200 output, but I don't know if they go higher than that.

Probably good for CAD, and fine for general desktop use. And undoubtedly lousy for videos and gaming.

Some of the DisplayLink USB adapters go beyond 1920x1080 and they work well on Macs too.

The best (DL-195) current ones do 1920x1200 or 2048x1152. Alternatively, if you waited a bit (and have Windows or Mac, and preferably USB3), you could get one of the just-announced next-generation ones that do 2560x1600 (but only on Displayport).

Peter

The key terminology to look for AMD graphics cards and more then 2-3 monitors is "eyefinity". it's mostly used to market the ability to game across 4-6 monitors, but also works for the windows desktop and applications.

Also from experience on the cards, the ones with 6 mini display port plugs tend to drive at least two screens with passive adapters out to HDMI/DVI/VGA.

Unfortunately I don't have any tips for dealing with the mess when these cards enter the marketplace via different vendors. Working in the gaming industry gave us access to the direct reference boards AMD or Nvidia creates, sometimes in a preproduction state.

I don't know if this helps, but I recently bought an Nvidia NVS450, which is fanless and has four active displayport outputs. I'm pretty happy with it. I've got it and an old Matrox card for a total of six outputs.

ATI has always caused me problems... I have a couple of ATI cards with three outputs, but all three are tied together...

Hi,

Video card and Monitor vendors have always lied.

Even back to the days of VGA adapters and monitors when they used to use 150 Ohm terminations instead of 75 Ohm because it made their displays "brighter". Poor bandwidth because of cable impedance match, but brighter.

They would also trade-off high frequency perfomance in their EMI R-G-B Output filters for regulatory compliance. This was obvious when you displayed a bunch of capital "T" or "H"s. The top bar of the T was brighter than the vertical bar of the T. Reverse video was terrible as things became washed-out because of poor slew rates.

Remember when they would fake the tests for the benchmarking (like BITBLTs, and common routines they would cache). It gave them impressive benchmark scores, but no better operational performance. They did this with Windows and Unix drivers.

They have always lied.

Ross

I suspect that the USB ones won't be any good, as they're most likely too slow.

The cad packages (particularly one PCB package I use all the time) redraw the screen constantly. I have found to my disgust that the new cards are MUCH slower than the 4.5 year old cards they were meant to replace, to the point that as I pan around in the package it takes (depending on amount of detail on the screen) up to about 2 seconds each time the screen redraws. This is unusable. I can't imagine that doing this over a USB link would be any faster.

The HD3850 cards do the same thing sufficiently fast that there is no perceptible lag. It's really massively annoying. Aside from anything else it means I've wasted £120 on a pair of cards that make the machine slightly quieter at the expense of making it so slow as to be useless. I've temporarily worked around it by making sure that the two monitors I do most of the CAD work on are connected to the 3850 card, but even so it's a real pain.

I can't believe how slow the things are. A memory bandwidth test program I found claims that the 6570 has a fill rate of around 30GB/s as against the the 3850's 45GB/s, but the visible speed difference is much much bigger than those figures would suggest. You'd think that in nearly five years of development ATI would have managed to improve the performance, not kill it so comprehensively.

I'm going to see if I can return them on the basis that they are only two port cards even though they were sold as three port ones, but I suspect I've basically thrown my money away.

The other annoyance is that the latest video drivers are too smart for their own damn good. In the old days, if I unplugged a monitor in a multi-monitor setup, that particular monitor would, unsurprising, go black. But that would be the only real result. So I could swap the physical connections around at will to test different monitors on different ports.

The new drivers are MUCH more clever than that, and know what I wanted better than I do So when I unplug a monitor, the computer detects this, and decides that I really wanted to shuffle the order of the remaining ones around instead, and EVERYTHING moves! So I can swap leads around all over the place, and the image on the monitor DOESN'T necessarily follow the physical port it's connected to What the hell? It makes testing things, or setting them up correctly, a real exercise in frustration. You end up with a pair of monitors suddenly and randomly mirroring a particular output, which wasn't the one EITHER of them were apparently connected to, another output no longer displaying on any monitor, and the remaining three moved around even though they weren't touched.

Very irritating.

So I either need to put the old cards back in and chalk it up to experience, or find a newer card that has the same or better performance than ones that are five years old, and spend yet more money

Any recommendations on graphics cards that actually work?

pca

The trick with AMD models is to break down the number (until there change the scheme again).

XYZ0

X represents the generation of the card. This tends to be the indicator of a smaller micron process for the GPU chip.
Y tends to represent the performance. The higher the better. Sometimes in tandem with X, this can mean a smaller chip from the previous generation, or a newer generation core architechure.
Z seems to represent the performance range within the Y family.

And from time to time, they change Y's meaning. I have a 5870. The 6870 is actually slower, and the proper upgrade path is a 6970.

Hi,

First of all, small circles and arcs (like vias), take alot of horsepower to draw especially for a PCB layout. Often, if vias or arcs are enabled and you are panning or zooming, they will bog a system down. Sometimes a video card will cache them and each time you move, it declares it dirty and flushes the cache. Try turing vias off (probably just disabling a display level) in P-CAD, Mentor, Allegro, Orcad, Zuken, or Express - I don't know what tool you are using. I know you can't run the tool that way, but eliminating arcs will tell you something about the problem. I assume you have checked the layout tool website for solutions to your video card if they have any.

Did the older ATI card that you had installed have the memory aperture configured? The Memory Aperture that ATI used in their designs uses a common address space in system memory to use as the system screen buffer (different than the on-card pixel buffer). In the older designs it used to speed things up alot - at one time it gave ATI an edge in the marketplace. You moved to a new card architecture and it may not have that capability. If it does, configure it and see if it helps.

One thing to consider is that the card is controlling multiple screen buffers. It probably has multiple processors, frame buffers, RAM, etc for that. Sooner or later, they all have to be prioritized and queued to talk to the host processor (your system CPU) and if that has not been managed efficiently, there may be a problem there too.

I assume that they are all set for high resolution and refresh rate. The more pixels to push around, the less time in between for processing changed screen buffer content. Some vendors X-OR the content with itself for faster execution time or just re-write over existing pixel buffer. If you are using DVI LED or LCD panels, sometimes the higher refresh times are wasted (unlike CRT displays). If you can't see a difference, reducing the refresh time from 75 Hz+ to 72 or 60Hz may make a difference. You have more processing time (up to 25% from 75Hz to 60Hz), during the Horizontal and Vertical Blanking interval (that's when you go to get changed video data from the host, process it, fill the input side of the video buffer, in preparation to clock it out to the output DACs), to process and push pixels around with the slower refresh rates. See if that helps.

I already assume you have shadowed the Video BIOS not that it makes much difference in high resolution graphics modes.

Ross

Have you tried any of the CAD cards, like ATI FireMV, ATI FirePro or Nvidia Quadro? Looks like they don't come cheap though.

Stig

We use Quadros in all our Technical and CAD PCs at work and have no complaints at all about the video card. I'm pretty sure the limitations we hit here are CPU and memory driven.