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Eyefinity on the cheap - My experience

Domi

Domi

Domi

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Joined
6 Sep 2008
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790
Well I recently bought a Saphire 5850 and a Crucial SSD (£313 for the pair very lucky on timing).

I already had a 22" cheapo Hans G 221 TFT (£107 sort of cheap) and my wife had said she would buy me a new one for my birthday late October and so it occured that for another £107 I could go Eyefinity.
For the centre monitor I chose a Dell P2210 it being about the cheapest displayport monitor available at the time while still getting decent reviews and looking to be a good match for the cheaper Hans Gs.

Note I also had to buy a £4.50 displayport cable from an auction site (lol at £25 from Dell) and had to change my main gaming OS from XP to Win7 though as I bought an SSD that was already a given.

First impressions are it is far from obvious how to actually set up eyefinity as there is no "eyefinity" tab in CCC and so it was an annoying process getting the thing working although not really difficult as such.
However I now have both landscape and Portrait eyefinity setups saved as profiles and have done some limited testing with games and I have to say the experience has been well worth the money so far.

My basic system is a Q6600 running at stock 4G ram and the 5850 and it genuinely surprised me just how well Eyefinity works at the resolutions that the 3 TFTs are putting out , every game I have tried has been more than playable so far.

I will mention one unexpeted issue in that I initially suffered what can only be described as motion sickness when playing with the 3 screens (only in landscape) but that seems to have cleared up.

So for now I have a triple monitor setup up and running 3 X 22" (3150x 1680) in portrait is my favoured option and really feels like I have one enormous screen and I supect I will not be going back.
 
Thanks for sharing.
Have you felt the need to get a second card for xfire or do you feel like your cpu is a bottleneck at all?
 
Eyefinity1stpic.jpg


1st piccy posted so hope I have not messed it up, quality is down to poor photography skills.

Early days and I have a good bit to sort out brightness and colour matching as well as note the monitior on the right I really want rotated the other way to cut out the bezel more.

But so far so good.
 
looking good there mate, dont take this wrong way but couldnt you use a 37/40inch lcd to get a similar size, also there would be no bezels in the way
 
I could indeed have just used a big tv but it really isnt the same you would have to try it to see.

Plus I actually have 3 machines hidden under the desk so already had 3 monitors (I multi box MMOs from time to time).

It is also surprising how much you seem to automatically filter out the bezels when playing but for me this was more an experiment to see what it would be like. I will seriously consider buying bezel less monitors as they become available.
 
I'm sort of in agreement with hyperst other than offering a ridiculously high resolution it seems to have some fairly massive flaws that kill any benefits for me, as demonstrated by your 3 piece aeroplane and floating text with 1-2inch of black bezel bang in the middle of it. I would also assume that consistency of the image might be a problem since many LCD's have different degrees of backlight bleeding in the corners.

To me it just seems like another gimmick rather than any sort of obvious "must have" improvement, there's just too many bad things about it for my liking. :(

That's not to say it's not a nice setup I just don't think it's for me given the money I'd sooner get a Dell 3008WFP which is a higher resolution and without the negatives.
 
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mmj_uk said:
I'm sort of in agreement with hyperst other than offering a ridiculously high resolution it seems to have some fairly massive flaws that kill any benefits for me, as demonstrated by your 3 piece aeroplane and floating text with 1-2inch of black bezel bang in the middle of it. I would also assume that consistency of the image might be a problem since many LCD's have different degrees of backlight bleeding in the corners.

To me it just seems like another gimmick rather than any sort of obvious "must have" improvement, there's just too many bad things about it for my liking. :(

That's not to say it's not a nice setup I just don't think it's for me given the money I'd sooner get a Dell 3008WFP which is a higher resolution and without the negatives.
Click to expand...

Read OP, he is happy with it so telling him why not do the large LCD because of some peoples issue with Belize's is moot.
 
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fair points mmj but note a 3008wfp cost a fair wack more than the £450 my 3 monitor setup cost. (and of course note that of that money a big chunk is the expensive monitor inthe middle)

The bezels are the biggest issue and this one will become a non issue in time as new monitors come out , something that does not seem to be considered is that the monitors do not have to lose the bezels on all sides.

I actually think that 2 cheap "side" monitors with a good centre is a surprisingly good setup and works very well indeed so far.

My original hope was that I could buy a big centre screen and have portrait landcsape portrait and this will still be my goal if and when it becomes available.
 
I'm with mmj. It's a nice set up, and I'm glad the OP is enjoying it, but IMO eyefinity is rubbish without bezel-less screens and just a gimmick.
 
wolvers69 said:
I'm with mmj. It's a nice set up, and I'm glad the OP is enjoying it, but IMO eyefinity is rubbish without bezel-less screens and just a gimmick.
Click to expand...

Everyone knows about the bezels & some people can put up with them & some cant.

The bezels have no bearing on res x res is a gimmick or not.

FOV is FOV no matter if there is a bezel, it will still give an advantage of more FOV.

FOV is not a gimmick.
 
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Final8y said:
Read OP, he is happy with it so telling him why not do the large LCD because of some peoples issue with Belize's is moot.
Click to expand...

If the OP didnt want opinions, im sure he wouldnt have posted in the first place.

im not knockin him for trying it out especially at that price for the screens, just dosn't do it for me with the bezels, i hate tearing in games, it'd send me nuts seeing the black bezels:D
bring on the bezeless screens:D:D
 
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