Powerplay and Eyefinity

gbeirn

Senior member
Sep 27, 2005
451
14
81
So I finally got my 5850 in today after having my 3 monitors and Display Port adapter for several weeks. Once it was all setup I realized my power consumption when way up (as measured by my APC UPS). After digging around the Internet for a bit it appears that Powerplay doesn't clock down the card (RAM especially) as far as it would if you only had a single display. Anyone else notice this or have any suggestions on how to lower the power usage?


Right now according to GPU-Z the RAM stays at 1000MHz and the core at 400MHz. Could editing the BIOS possibly change this at all? I guess it isn't too horrible but I wish there was a review somewhere that stated that this would happen.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Is there any possible way to quickly switch from a single display (for web browsing, etc.) to Eyefinity mode (for gaming)?
Thanks!
 

happy medium

Lifer
Jun 8, 2003
14,387
480
126
Those clocks are right. Any lower and it will start to crash on the desktop and when watching flash video. I think this was the hot fix.
 

Ualdayan

Member
May 11, 2004
76
0
66
Any suggestions would be appreciated. Is there any possible way to quickly switch from a single display (for web browsing, etc.) to Eyefinity mode (for gaming)?
Thanks!

Set all your settings to the single display settings you want, then create a profile for it and hotkey it. Then do the same for Eyefinity.

I use ALT-E to go into eyefinity mode, and ALT-R to exit for example.
 

gbeirn

Senior member
Sep 27, 2005
451
14
81
Thanks! Thats exactly what I was looking for. I would like to save the power when possible since I will only be using Eyefinity for a few hours a week.