Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hi.
Just setup my first triple setup and I'm going nuts.

I've got a 5850 card, 3 Dell P3210H (with displayports) and win7 64bit and the latest catalyst software.

The mid screen has the displayport cable, left screen is DVI in the top port on the card, the right screen is DVI on the bottom port of the card.

Only the left and mid screen is picked up by catalyst, I've switched ports to check if the screens are ok, and they are. All points to the fact that no signal is sent to the bottom DVI port...

I can group the two screens just fine and it behaves exactly as it should, I'm "just" missing one screen :( to group.

Has anyone else encountered this, if so how did you solve it?

I'm really hoping it's not a hardware issue and that it's just me being stupid :D
Thanx in advance for all help :)
/Dan

I've got the same setup but with a 5870 and mine does see all 3 monitors.

Something may be wrong with that bottom DVI port..

That bottom DVI doesn't output on double or single screen? If so, then it's clearly a faulty card. You try another DVI cable?

Yea, I've gotten a lot of feedback from a lot of different places while waiting for my post here to be approved and it does indeed seem like the bottom DVI port is broken.

The screen connected to the bottom DVI port does not work regardless of single, double, extended eyefinity mode, It doesn't even show up in Catalyst or in the windows hardware manager. whatever you connect to it, you get "no signal" regardless of input setting on the monitor.

I've tried different screens, different cables, the system only sees two screens and Catalyst only sees two screens. I can create a group of the two screens and stretch over them just fine using Eyefinity so the drivers seems to be installed correctly.

Everything runs on a 3 year old HP d4860.se with the hp-branded version of the A8M2N-LA motherboard with what I think is the nVidia chipset, Athlon 64x2 5200+, 4 GB ram, Corsair 650w PSU, Soundblaster X-FI.

Running Win7 Home Premium after a clean install up from XP Pro.
No conflicts detected anywhere.

I've heard second hand rumors that some has had compability problems with ASUS motherboards with nVidia chipsets. However, tracking down some threads on that it seems like those errors are that the PC won't boot at all, that's clearly not the case for me.

Just got a tip though, since my screens have HDMI as well as DVI, DP and VGA I "should" be able to use 1 DP, 1 DVI and 1 HDMI cable and get my widescreen set going... I'll give that a try when I get home.

I'm in contact with the supplier about RMA/warranty etc but they don't have this card in stock now and I do not want to sit around with one screen of three working for months... Would be nice If I can get it working during the wait :)

/Dan

I had the same problem,what i found out is the screens have to be DVI-I not DVI-D or the graphics card wont pick up the 3rd dvi screen.

the fix is to get HDMI-DVI-D single link cable which is about $8-$10

problem solved :mrgreen:

Yes, using another port for now should work. But it's indicative of sloppy manufacturing, so be sure to RMA it ASAP.

PS - that CPU will hold you GPU back a fair amount. If you're looking to triple-screen, you'll need every bit of power your video card has.A buddy of mine just replaced HIS 5200+ with a 6000+ for only $60 CAD.. Sadly, there seem to be no AM2 quad-cores, but AM2+ supports quad.

And hey, if the card is new enough, you may be able to pay the difference to a better card, if you have some extra cash.

Lame that your port has died, but yay that you seem to have found the problem.

I had the same problem,what i found out is the screens have to be DVI-I not DVI-D or the graphics card wont pick up the 3rd dvi screen.

the fix is to get HDMI-DVI-D single link cable which is about $8-$10

problem solved :mrgreen:

That was news to me!
My screens are DVI-D, however a LOT of ppl over at iRacing where I hang out run this exact combo and they just plugged it in and it worked...

Yes, using another port for now should work. But it's indicative of sloppy manufacturing, so be sure to RMA it ASAP.

PS - that CPU will hold you GPU back a fair amount. If you're looking to triple-screen, you'll need every bit of power your video card has.A buddy of mine just replaced HIS 5200+ with a 6000+ for only $60 CAD.. Sadly, there seem to be no AM2 quad-cores, but AM2+ supports quad.

And hey, if the card is new enough, you may be able to pay the difference to a better card, if you have some extra cash.

Lame that your port has died, but yay that you seem to have found the problem.

I grabbed a HDMI->DVI cable and connected the third screen that way.
One more thing I did before testing due to some sound conflicts I had was to uninstall Catalyst and reinstall it without the HDMI Audio drivers.

As everything booted again all three screens was there and I could setup Eyefinity :D

I'll try with a different DVI cable as suggested above as well to further test the dvi-port, come to think of it, so far I've only switched between the cables that came with the monitors.

As for performance.
I only do racing simulators and mostly iRacing and have some known combos that eats FPS that I use to measure performance.

To give you some reference points:
With my old setup (4850 512 Mb @ 24" 1920x1200) at one of these combos I had 50 FPS in pits, 60 at infield and 97 at the least intensive part of the track.

With only one 1920x1200 screen on the 5850 card I had 90 FPS in pits, 115 at infield and 180 at the least intensive part of the track.

As I got the triple setup running in Eyefinity at 5760 x 1080 I ended up with the following: 60 FPS in pits, 78 at infield and 120 at the least intensive part of the track. This is even with the option where the iRacing sim renders three different synched screens which should give an FPS hit in itself.
This card can push some serious pixel volumes!

So yes, it's a performance hit and I had to adjust some details ingame but absolutely nothing that I'll miss while racing. Still, the FPS is markedly better in widescreen than what I had with the old card and it's way over the level where the FPS drop is noticeable.

If I upgrade more, I'll swap the motherboard and go with an i5 or an i7.

And WOW what an experience it is with widescreen gaming for real!!!
It's way way beyond what I expected (and I expect a lot ;) )

A shitty cellphone pic can be seen here:


Thanx for your help all, and I'll let you know what turns out with the (faulty?) dvi-port.