Author: Jester The Tester
Rating: 5
Review: These StarTech Mini DisplayPort to DVI Active Adapters work an absolute treat with my 6850's ~ I am using 2xDVi to DVi and 2x Active MiniDP to DVi cables, and now have 4 monitors running on each card and have Windows Experience scores of 7.7 & 7.7 out of 7.9 for Graphics & Gaming Graphics (on Win7 Ultimate 64bit). My situation was... I have 2 VTX3D Radeon HD 6850 X-Edition 1GB GDDR5 graphics cards. Each card has 2xDVi, 1xHDMi and 2x MiniDisplayPort. I wanted to use each card to run 4 DVi monitors... So I bought some (Passive) MiniDP to DVi adaptors (long story short... passive ones won't work for what I needed), so I did some more research, found these StarTech active cables are / should be compatible... But, at just shy of £21 each cable, I wasn't going to buy 4 on the hope that they would work... so I bought 2 to test them...and see if / how good they would work... Then once I found out how good they are, I bought 2 more. So my conclusion... At just shy of £21 each cable, they're not cheap... (Amazon price is lower than anywhere else). BUT they work!! And they work very well... And I'm glad I've got them.
Author: Mike Rhowbotham
Rating: 2
Review: Very dissapointed. My example works without any electrical reliability issues as reported by others, BUT it does not meet it stated specification. I purchased this item specifically to play the upcoming game "Elite : Dangerous" (I signed up to the Kickstarter campaign as a Beta backer). My plan was to use the three 1920 x 1080 monitors with my Radeon 6950 card using Eyefinity, with 1 DisplayPort and 2 DVI connections. At low resoloution it works fine - very impressive but the mini Display Port adapter cannot handle 1920 x 1080. When used at this resoloution the system halts, black screen then tries again etc. - completely unusable in the game. My first thoughts were if the graphics card was up to the job? A bit of research seemed to indicate that it should be so I looked into it further - obviously a long story that I wont bore you with. I found that when I set up a single monitor at 1920 x 1080, plugged in with a DVI cable, video worked just fine, change the connection to Displayport using the StarTech adapter and the game runs for a few seconds, and video is lost, comes back etc. - same behaviour as before. I have concluded that the Displayport adapter is not up to the job at 1920 x 1080 and as such does not meet its specification. If you run non graphics intensive software under eyefinity then it appears to work very nicely, Run graphics intensive games and it does not work. I cannot recommend this item for any kind of graphics intensive use.
