Be warned! ATI Radeon HD5770 graphics card.

Terry Pratchett only had 6 monitors fitted to his computer as he couldn’t get 8 on his desk 🙂  O.K. well I didn’t want 8 or even 6 monitors – I only wanted 3.  Looking at the graphics cards offered by ATI there are a few which state that they will support 3 monitors – however, look at the small print right down at the bottom of the page.  The card as supplied will only actually support 2 monitors – if you wish to run a third monitor you need to purchase a separate active displayport adapter which goes in-line between the monitor and the graphics card.  Now here comes the good bit – it doesn’t look like you can actually get one of these in the U.K. right now, so as you can guess I am well and truly pleased.  If the main spec on a graphics card says that it will support 3 monitors I expect it to do just that – I don’t expect there to be fine print at the bottom  of the page saying only if you have a displayport adapter – being generous this is at the very least misleading.  So there you have it, you have been warned.  By the way, you can by an Accell active displayport adapter on Amazon.com (States) but they won’t ship to the U.K.  So if you find yourself going down this route too, E-mail a mate that lives in the States and see if they will buy and ship you one over.  I am highly unimpressed with this state of affairs, and congratulations to ATI, this is the first time I’ve felt “stung” in buying any computer component in 20 years – usually I am highly impressed at the value for money offered by most companies.

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2 Responses to Be warned! ATI Radeon HD5770 graphics card.

  1. Joe Callan says:

    I fell for the same thing with an NVidia card, actually. Three outputs on the card, but only two are usable at any given time.

    Doubling up on video cards wasn’t too expensive, though–my primary card (PCI-x) has 1GB of video RAM while the other has 512MB (PCI). The secondary PCI card I bought (after I found out I was burned like you) was only about $65, so if you’ve got an extra PCI slot and you’re willing to drop the forty quid–multiple gfx cards are the way to go.

  2. Greg Parker says:

    Hi Joe,

    Unfortunately I only have the one slot – if I had two on the motherboard I would have gone straight for the doubling-up solution and saved myself a lot of grief. In fact as I have a couple of spare graphics cards with 2 DVI ports on each I might have been better off buying a new motherboard in the first place!!!

    Greg

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