does anyone have one of these, or offer advice about buying one

[Hivetyrant]

And back onto your question...

The 5870 eyefinity 6 edition cards are super cheap now if you are looking to save or just to experiment, but the XFX 5970 is awesome.

[alcattle]

looks like the monitors are wall mounted. no angles for improved pictures? still pretty damn hot

[Alptraum]

And back onto your question...

The 5870 eyefinity 6 edition cards are super cheap now if you are looking to save or just to experiment, but the XFX 5970 is awesome.

I was hoping the 5970 was packing enough of a punch to really be awesome, the 5870 was sorta an ok but nothing terribly great to write home about from what i've seen and read. I was all excited when it first came out, but after looking over the specs I put the breaks on, untill this card came out.

I know the biggest hurdle is finding 6 monitors with small enough bezels that I can live with, Im not a fan of dell or i'd ask what you were running there.

Over all, how is your performance when running single toon, across all 6 screens ??? im assuming your running the 5870 right now the 5970 ???, im hoping to have no bottlenecks in my new rig with 24 gigs of ram and the 700 meg read/writes from the ssd card, assuming even if they only do 450-500 meg actual.

[Sajuuk]

5870 was sorta an ok but nothing terribly great to write home about from what i've seen and read.

What? The 5870 is a great card, and still trumps the AMD cards currently released (the 6800 is really the low end of the spectrum for the new cards, but meh), and the 5970 is really two 5850s in crossfire (not entirely sure about the XFX BLACK, it might be two 5870s, clocks seem to match). MY POINT BEING: YOU CAN GET THE SAME SOLUTION AS THE XFX 5970 BLACK FOR LESS BY PURCHASING TWO 5870 EYEFINITY6 cards!

In fact, you could buy three 5870 eyefinity6 cards for the price of one 5970 black card. The only limiting factors are: motherboard layout and power supply. Just think of all the monitors you could run! 18! OMGSWEET YAY THINKING

(also please to note the extra horsepower would come in handy when playing graphically intensive games, as well as for splitting rendering of each clients between cards)

That hard drive is fine, all it does is bypass the limits on speed for SATA2 interfaces, not that big of an issue. Again, to save money (and preserve precious motherboard space for graphics cards) you could get any number of other solid state drives, even Buy two of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227590 and you'd be just fine.


thinking about alternatives is good.

[Alptraum]

What? The 5870 is a great card, and still trumps the AMD cards currently released (the 6800 is really the low end of the spectrum for the new cards, but meh), and the 5970 is really two 5850s in crossfire (not entirely sure about the XFX BLACK, it might be two 5870s, clocks seem to match). MY POINT BEING: YOU CAN GET THE SAME SOLUTION AS THE XFX 5970 BLACK FOR LESS BY PURCHASING TWO 5870 EYEFINITY6 cards!

In fact, you could buy three 5870 eyefinity6 cards for the price of one 5970 black card. The only limiting factors are: motherboard layout and power supply. Just think of all the monitors you could run! 18! OMGSWEET YAY THINKING

(also please to note the extra horsepower would come in handy when playing graphically intensive games, as well as for splitting rendering of each clients between cards)

That hard drive is fine, all it does is bypass the limits on speed for SATA2 interfaces, not that big of an issue. Again, to save money (and preserve precious motherboard space for graphics cards) you could get any number of other solid state drives, even Buy two of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227590 and you'd be just fine.


thinking about alternatives is good.

Sorry I was refering to the previous Eyefinity6 card...the specs for it were less then the 5970, it was basicly just 2 cards mashed together, and I didnt think the performance was that great, without attempting to crossfire multiple cards together.

Now im hoping this new version truely is their most powerful card to date, im avoiding going back down the 3-4 sli/crossfire phase again, I did that with 8800 ultra's and at the time, only one monitor was able to be active well running in SLI, turning off the SLI allowed for all 6 screens to be active, but the noise/heat issues were a nightmare. I'll willingly pay extra for 1 card that does it all, and hopefully this is such a beast.

[Sajuuk]

Sorry I was refering to the previous Eyefinity6 card...the specs for it were less then the 5970, it was basicly just 2 cards mashed together, and I didnt think the performance was that great, without attempting to crossfire multiple cards together.

Now im hoping this new version truely is their most powerful card to date, im avoiding going back down the 3-4 sli/crossfire phase again, I did that with 8800 ultra's and at the time, only one monitor was able to be active well running in SLI, turning off the SLI allowed for all 6 screens to be active, but the noise/heat issues were a nightmare. I'll willingly pay extra for 1 card that does it all, and hopefully this is such a beast.

We're not going to run them in crossfire. They're there for three reasons (splitting rendering of wow clients between cards for MAXIMUM performance, extra monitors (12-18 anyone!?), and lastly to accelerate multiple instances of applications that can use the card for parallel computing.) The first two are what we're really going to look at.

The regular 5970 is really two 5850 dies on one PCB, the XFX black one is (I think) two 5870s( or the equivalent) taking up two slots instead of four, for a very high premium. Get two cards for 2/3rds the price of one, with possibly easier overclocking? Yes please.

[Hivetyrant]

The regular 5970 is really two 5850 dies on one PCB, the XFX black one is (I think) two 5870s( or the equivalent) taking up two slots instead of four, for a very high premium. Get two cards for 2/3rds the price of one, with possibly easier overclocking? Yes please.

I believe it's still the two 5850's but with 4gig of memory instead of the usual 2, could be wring though.

[Sajuuk]

I believe it's still the two 5850's but with 4gig of memory instead of the usual 2, could be wring though.

As could I. I'm not entirely certain of it, actually, now that I think again, it's just two 5850s, ASUS had a republic of gamers card that was, in fact two 5870s. (ASUS ARES)

Oh, and it's dual 2gb 5850s.