Eyefinity With An Affordable Gaming PC?
Having three monitors is great for gaming. While console players may prefer their 42 inch HDTVs, wrap-around monitors provide a whole different experience. Eyefinity with 3 monitors is easily setup on a normal desk (i.e. without a rig) and considering the abundance of 1080p displays on the market it's a great time to think about it. While ROG is almost always invested in making the fastest of fastest tech, we wanted to show Eyefinity is possible without resorting to super high-end hardware.
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We got in touch with a few friends at AMD, CoolerMaster and G.Skill to lend some hardware, and then we went away to build our gaming PC. This is what we came up with:
- ROG Crosshair V Formula motherboard
- Two Radeon HD 6870 DirectCU 1GB graphics cards in CrossFireX
- AMD FX-8140 CPU at ~4GHz (compatible with the latest existing C5F BIOS and due for public release soon!)
- G.Skill RipjawsZ, 8GB 1,600MHz DDR3
- Cooler Master Storm Trooper Chassis
- Cooler Master Silent Gold Pro 600W PSU
- Cooler Master Hyper 612 CPU cooler
- Crucial M3 128GB SSD
- Three ASUS 1920x1080 monitors
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From here we threw some popular games at it: Mass Effect 3 demo, Skyrim and the original Crysis. Here are the best playable settings we found:
Mass Effect 3 Demo:
Maximum Resolution, Everything on Full - 40-60FPS.
While the game loads and plays on Eyefinity-3 just fine, although the resolution options don't appear to offer much choice. We await the full game to see more.
Sykrim (1.4 patch):
Maximum Resolution, High Settings, 4xAA, 8xAF - 25-40FPS. It requires these tweaks to the SkyrimPerfs.ini file:
iSize W=5760
iSize H=1080
Beware that the main menu's don't work, so be sure to know to hit enter-enter to continue your existing game, but once in the action and after some depth of field (DoF) tweaking by hitting the ` key and typing 'dof 80' (our preferred setting) it looks fine.
Crysis (1.21 patch):
While not actively played, this 2007 title is still often used as a benchmark for heavy game-play and it's Eyefinity support is well documented, although if you fancy revisiting this classic shooter at 5760x1080 - on High detail (with a couple of Very High - your mileage may vary) without AA and with 8xAF it yields a playable 25-40FPS.
See our new video below of this gaming PC in action, and be sure to watch until the end to see our latest competition!
