The story so far...

My first Eyefinity trial happened about 3 weeks ago at the dawn of the new year.
It was quite interesting but rather short lived and not in a very harmonic way.
There were my two 24 inch PC-screens, a Dell 2407wfp and a Samsung 2493HM both natively running in 1920*1200 and connected via DVI. And then there was my TV, a LG 32LF2500 running 1920*1080 connected to my Radeon 5850 by a Display Port - VGA adapter.

While obviously just seen as a first taste of what was yet to come, with my two PC-screens stretching the image a bit to their native resolution and differently sized displays, it still was very impressive.

The first impression of Race Driver: Grid blew me away. And mind you, I'm not even talking about playing, but just the menu. Incredible.
Racing was rather nice too, however I noticed some not so slight slowdowns with everything turned to maximum (except FSAA which was turned off).

Oh well, off to Team Fortress 2 I went and validated my first impression. Yep... Eyefinity is what I imagined it to be. Actually much more than that.

I also used my TV to watch streaming videos from my PC (NFL Gamepass), and noticed the dreaded screen flicker. While not necessarily enough to annoy it was a slight negative. But for the time being the screen turning black for a second once per hour would have to make do.

Until this Tuesday when I finally received my 3rd 24" PC screen with 1920*1200 pixels. And also a display port. Granted it was the lowest priced one I could find, a HP LA2405wg but due to a number of mix ups I got it for a great price. Downside to this was a rather long waiting time.

Anyhow, that was this Tuesday, and I connected it.

And it worked. Beautifully indeed. However Grid, Dirt2 did not run as smoothly as I would have hoped. Admittedly 5760*1200 is a whole lot of pixels for a Radeon5850, but still, I would have hoped for fewer slowdowns while playing.
Even TeamFortress2 did dip down to 20 fps frequently.

*sigh*

Then again I certainly could have turned down the graphics setting by a fair margin to receive playable frame rates. Indeed I was set on doing his when a slight disaster struck.

My venerable Core2Duo E6400 (I nicknamed him Conroe), overclocked to >3Ghz since I got him nearly 3 years ago on his Gigabyte 965P-DQ6 mainboard suddenly didn't want to be overclocked anymore.

Or rather it did want to as I certainly managed to validate by using easy tune instead of the BIOS setting that worked before. But after the Memory Check and the Message that my Memory "run in Dual Channel Interleaved" right before taking stock of the attached SATA/IDE Drives the PC would reboot only to start with stock speeds again. That would happen even with very moderate overclocks. Actually even if just setting PCIe frequency to 100mhz instead of "Auto" it wouldn't completely boot.

Well that certainly was quite a downer right there. Especially considering that I didn't quite understand the reasons for. I would come to learn and understand. But before I found time to test for the faulty component I did notice some quirks with the Catalyst 10.1 drivers.