Does AMD’s AM1 platform support triple monitors natively? No.
Kabini only supports two simultaneous displays
If you plan on using AMD new’s AM1 platform with a Kabini Athlon or Sempron, be aware that triple display output is not supported. I tried it on my MSI AM1I motherboard just to make sure and sadly only two outputs were usable at a time 🙁
So even if your motherboard has DVI + HDMI + VGA, like mine does, you can only utilize TWO of those outputs at once. Not three.
Kind of a bummer, as I would love to drive three displays off of a tiny system drawing very few watts.
QHD etc. on AMD Kabini
I tried connecting my 30″ Dell to my MSI AM1’s DVI port and it definitely does NOT support dual-link DVI, the supported resolutions maxed out at 1280×800 (exactly half of 2560×1600). As far as I can tell, none of the Kabini motherboards have dual link DVI support. 🙁
So if you are planning on using a greater than 1080p display that uses dual-link DVI, like an older 2560×1600 monitor 30″ LCD, you will NOT be able to do it with Kabini unless you have a motherboard with displayport and you utilize an active displayport to dual-link DVI adapter.
On the other hand, if your monitor supports the latest HDMI specs for high-res then Kabini will be able to drive those 2560×1440 displays etc. via HDMI 🙂
Not neccesarily. That’s what they said for ordinary ( non-Eyefinity cards) too, but I’m using ordinary HD6850 with triple monitor setup – on Linux. After some headaches,s earching and a bunch of tests with elcheapo adapters.
At least with ordinary AMD GPUs bottleneck are PLLs. When using non-DP output, ( so VGA, DVI or HDMI or even DP in non-native mode – that is with passive adapter to HDMI/DVI slot) PLL is needed for precise timings that are generated for particular monitor. There are only 2 PLLs, so can have up to 2 independent non-DP picture sources.
I use 3 monitors in such setup becaue:
1. All my monitors are the same and use exact same timings, so just one PLL can generate timings for all.
2. I use relatively fresh linux radeon driver, which takes care of that.
I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m pretty certain that it would work even with 4-th monitors, if I added another on now unused DP port. SInce monitopr doesn’t have DP input, I’d have to use passive elchapo DP-DV adapter ( basically two connectors ). DP would then generate DVI signals from the same PLL.
Hi Brane212, thank you for the great info!
Very cool to know that AM1 on Linux can support triple monitors 🙂
A couple questions:
+Do you have any recommendations for specific motherboards and monitors?
+Any chance of this working on Windows?
Thanks again for sharing!
-J.D.