12K (Triple 4K Monitor) Graphics Test Bench Upgrade Review

Final Thoughts

Summary

So there we have it, one of the most demanding system display configurations currently available to the mainstream consumer market for reasonable purchase costs. If you were to purchase such an extreme display option, one of the major considerations that must be made is the fact that most 4K monitors are 24″, which can easily add up to well over 1 metre of desk coverage. To hold our triple AOC U2868PQU monitors, I had to build a custom desk and I wish I made it bigger!

Despite the size issue, I loved spending time working on such an immense screen size. Just watching the benchmark software run the course, you see so much more information that you would normally miss with a conventional display. However, it’s not all about gaming when using multiple monitors, right now I’m using three just to work on, one for videos, one for research, and one for typing this very article. With the triple 4K monitor array, I could do all of that work on a single monitor and still have two free for whatever else I wanted.

AMD Round-Up

Thanks to the recent launch of the R9 Fury range and the rest of the R9 300 series, performance from AMD has really been kicked up a notch and is enough to make NVIDIA sweat. However, as stated earlier in the article, AMD and this particular AOC monitor have issues working together above 30Hz. Both parties have been made aware and are collaborating together to source a fix; in the past it was as simple as a driver update to correct the issue, let’s hope it’s the same this time.

Even though I turned the graphics settings down to medium for testing, all of the cards struggled to produce any figures that you can shout about; to achieve a respectable 60FPS, the settings would have to be turned down even more. The R9 Fury X proved a great card at 4K, but moving up to triple monitors really put the strain on the compact powerhouse. In the future, we will test the Fury X in crossfire to settle whether the 4GB of HBM VRAM really proves a hindrance. The R9 390X on the other hand, would have ample VRAM to sustain this monitor configuration, however it lacked performance to really drive FPS up; crossfire, or even tri-fire would be the only viable solution at this resolution.

NVIDIA Round-Up

NVIDIA know how to make a fast graphics card and up until now I thought they were crazy slapping on 12GB VRAM onto the Titan X. If we receive another sample to allow SLI, we should see some very favourable scores as the 12GB would allow the two GPU’s to really push the boundary. When it comes to the GTX 980Ti, it has the power to match the Titan X, but the 6GB VRAM just starts to take some of the performance way; although this wouldn’t be noticeable in real world usage.

In regards to reliability, the NVIDIA combinations proved very little in the way of issues, I barely had to go into the settings to correctly setup the monitors apart from telling the software which monitor was where.

Overall, no single card is a match for the immense pixel quantity of these monitors, even the R9 295×2 and Titan Z would struggle. For the time being, I would leave multiple 4K monitors to those with more money than sense, professionals or extreme gamers; at least until the pixel per inch and price comes down

Pros

• Workable screen space is enormous
• Immersive gaming
• Pure enjoyment

Cons

• 4K is still expensive compared to 1440p
• Multiple high-end graphics cards are required to smoothly run games
• Affordable 4K monitors have thicker bezels, making a surround set-up less than pleasurable
• Relatively large screens make triple 4K monitors a very large option

“With so much space on offer, triple 4K monitors is definitely a step in the right direction, but for 2015, I’ll just stick to my single 4K monitor.”

Thank you to all of the manufacturers for providing these review samples.