Why owners of single-monitor PCs may be interested in AMD's new series of Radeon HD 5000

Nov 9, 2009 11:36 GMT  ·  By

Although still not available, enough information about the soon-to-be latest in the HD 5000 series, the HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition, has made its way to the Internet. Considering the approaching winter holidays, there are undoubtedly those who would consider this flagship product an option for a Christmas system upgrade. With the main perk of this adapter being its latest ATI Eyefinity technology (which allows for an up to six-monitor display), the question may arise concerning whether single-display PC owners may be interested in purchasing this product for that sole reason.

ATI's Eyefinity enables a single GPU to support up to six high-resolution displays at the same time. This means that gamers or HTPC owners may be especially enthralled by the prospect of increasing their experience sixfold. Nevertheless, it is no secret that normal PC owners exist in a far greater number, which brings the question: what does this new card have that would appeal to single-display users and make them choose it over the regular HD 5870?

The Eyefinity 6 delivers various upgrades that make it superior to the normal 5870 in more ways than one. The memory buffer is double that of the 5870, namely 2 GB GDDR5. This implies a much smoother performance, regardless of the number of displays used, providing monitors with up to 2,560x1,600 pixels each. This high-pixel density is enough to satisfy even the most hardcore of gamers. Not only that, but the new chip fully supports DirectX 11. This means that the video adapter will support most new software features that are set to come out during 2010, removing the need for frequent hardware upgrades.

AMD's new HD 5000 series flagship and the plain-vanilla 5870 have two things in common: the frequency: 850MHz GPU clock and 4,800MHz memory clock, and the ATI Stream technology. ATI Stream allows the GPU to synchronize with the CPU in order to accelerate the performance of every type of application, allowing platforms to make full use of their resources. Although already capable of high-speed computing, the 2GB used by the Eyefinity 6 will provide the possibility of running even more applications at the same time.

Not only that, but the power source of the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition has been boosted from two six-pin molex connectors to one six-pin and one eight-pin connector. This means that, although not especially concerned with achieving a low-energy usage, the higher power access will ensure the device's stability and optimum performance, regardless of the number or complexity of the running applications.

Although still not official, the HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 promises much, not only to multi-display owners, but to single-monitor desktops as well.