AMD Radeon HD 6870 CrossFire with 5x1 Eyefinity

Before we get down to the nitty gritty, we want to give you all a sense of just how many pixels users have available when sitting in front of a five-screen Eyefinity display group, using monitors with a native resolution of 1920x1080. The two images below are actual screen captures of the Windows desktop and a game, Alien vs. Predator, at resolutions of 5400x1920.

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Are those images freakin’ huge or what? The benefits of gaming or working with multiple screens should be apparent. The field of view in games is so wide, you’ll be able to see much more in your periphery, which has obvious benefits. When working on a desktop this big, users can simply see more in front of them. That image is a recent five-page review, with all five pages open at once.

We tested the PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 Eyefinity 6 Edition cards on a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard powered by a Core i7-980X six-core processor and 6GB of OCZ DDR3-1333 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system BIOS and set all values to their "optimized" or "high performance" defaults. Then we manually configured the memory timings (DDR3-1333, CAS 7) and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the installation was complete, we fully updated the OS and installed the latest DirectX redist, along with the necessary drivers, games, and benchmark applications.

Our first group of tests show the PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 2GB Eyefinity 6 Edition cards offering excellent performance scaling when running in CrossFire mode. All of the applications show big performance improvements when moving from a single cards to dual cards. We'll summarize them all on the next page, after running through a few more, and then we'll get to the wild stuff.