Eyefinity 6 - revisited

I've been running the Eyefinity 6 on the Dell T7500 for a few weeks. Mostly it's been great to compare bugs we find with M9188. I'm sure the EyeFinity 6 kicks ass in gaming and is a high-performing card, but I still find it highly annoying for running in 6 displays. I was going to use the word "performant" but apparently it's not an English word. [It's a perfectly good French word however]

Other then the issues I've already complained about, the fact it requires active displayport to DVI adapters on 4 of it's 6 heads when you use DVI, it has other really annoying behaviors.

Lets say you trip over a cable and one of your monitors get unplugged. Then all your monitors go black while it and Windows 7 decides how it's going to reconfigure your displays. So if you had display 1 on a particular monitor, now it might be display 5. Because 1 and 5 are really the same to windows, I mean who cares if monitor 5 is at the other end of the bench far away from  your mouse and keyboard. Unplugging and replugging to get the layout you want might be a waste of time because each time you change something around it also changes things around for you.

With M9188 if I unplug 1 monitor, that monitor goes black. It doesn't matter if I was  using displayport, dvi or analog. I can even swap between the 3 and it will not affect the config of any of the other outputs. They will continue to display and the monitors will stay exactly how  you configured them.

Each time anyone of us touches anything with the Eyefinity 6  it takes 2 of us to figure out how to get it back in the config we want again.Their drivers aren't particularly intuitive to install or to uninstall for that matter, and the features they offer aren't as useful as the features offered on M9188 to manage the desktops. Ati's idea of desktop management is where you put your displays. M9188's idea of desktop management is to help you manage your applications on layouts with more then 2 screens.

Anyone who uses an M9188 who complains about how to configure it has never used an Eyefinity 6. Sure the M9188 does not have great 3D performance, but this isn't it's market. However the M9188 is highly configurable and very user friendly. The features offered are aimed at making a multiple monitor layout a pleasant experience and offers features to help in that respect.

Part of ATI's mistake is letting Windows 7 handle most of the work. You'd think Microsoft would realize that no one runs with 1 display anymore, and in fact if there is a gaming card out with 6 displays it means it's client base wants good support for multiple monitors. However this is not the case. It was obvious the first time I put a pair of ATI FireMV 2400 PCIe x1 card in a system, attached a monitor to each of the 8 heads and let Windows 7 load the driver that was already in the OS. The screens flashed on and off for over 15 minutes.  By the time it finished the third head of one of the two cards was the primary display.  I had to reboot 3 more times to get a usable layout.