AMD postpones introduction of HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition

On Thursday, March 11, AMD was due to release its ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition. However, the manufacturer has postponed the release for unknown reasons. The card is expected to be available around the end of March.

Perhaps the release has been delayed because AMD needs more time to optimize the drivers. However, it’s also conceivable that the manufacturer is purposely making the release coincide with the release of Nvidia’s GTX470 and GTX480 cards at the end of this month. The two ruffs in the video card market have tried to outdo each other more than once.

The ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition is a special version of the HD 5870 that is equipped with six mini display port outputs, allowing the card to be connected to six monitors. AMD also supplies adapters for two regular displayport, two DVI and two HDMI connections.

Another change from the original HD 5870 is the presence of 2GB instead of 1GB gddr5 memory. This should improve the card’s ability to provide continuous images to the six screens. The card could display a maximum of 2560×1600 pixels in Eyefinity mode on each of the six screens, but playable framerates are likely to be reached by the dedicated HD 5870 only at 1920×1080 pixels per screen. AMD also claims that the 2GB model performs significantly better than HD 5870 cards with 1GB in triple monitor setups.

The other specifications are identical to those of the HD 5870, but because of the extra memory, the tdp with 228W is somewhat higher than the 188W of the original card. AMD has not yet announced the price and exact release date.