Club3D SenseVision MST Hub CSV-5300 Review

Performance and Usage

The Club3D MST Hub is intended to be used with relatively new graphics processors (that support the MST standard and the latest DisplayPort revision of 1.2). If used with old graphics cards from the GTX 500 and HD 5000 series or older you may not be able to activate multiple displays but will instead have a very expensive DisplayPort pass-through and two ports that do nothing. Club3D state that the HD 5000 does support multiple displays but we do not have a GPU that old to validate that claim. That said we tested with new Nvidia and AMD GPUs so we will now let you know our performance experiences from latest generation AMD and Nvidia graphics cards.

Nvidia GTX 700/600 Series

We used the Nvidia GTX 770 2GB reference card and ran three displays from the MST hub. We connected one using DVI, one using HDMI and another using DisplayPort. All three displays were individually detected and ran at their maximum native resolutions. That said we had a 1920 x 1080 display running over HDMI, a 1920 x 1080 display running over DVI and a 2560 x 1440 display running over DisplayPort. All showed up instantly and it was literally a matter of plug and play, we used Nvidia Forceware 320.49 drivers.

Sadly with Nvidia graphics cards the Club3D MST hub does not allow you to span your displays into “Nvidia Surround” meaning you effectively gain very little in terms of desktop functionality on a desktop card, however this is a driver-support related issue on Nvidia’s side so there isn’t really much Club3D can do. On most modern Nvidia graphics card you will already have four display outputs, like the GTX 770/GTX 680,which can already run the  3+1 display maximum that latest Nvidia consumer GPUs support. Adding the MST hub allows you to run three of those displays from the single DisplayPort leaving other ports free but you can still only run another single display from those other ports. Of course on an Nvidia notebook having the MST hub would be useful to get extra displays but again you are still limited by no Nvidia Surround support so this is definitely a big draw-back that Nvidia should consider fixing with updated drivers. The only real advantage to be had on Nvidia desktop graphics cards is that you can connect all three displays in via DisplayPort which gives better colour accuracy and clarity than DVI and HDMI because DP runs direct from the GPU engine to the display and has no processing chips along the route. Of course if you are short on display connectors on your card then the MST hub would would also be useful – it allows you to achieve four displays from just two ports providing one is DP or mini-DP.

AMD HD 6000/7000 Series

We used our AMD HD 7870 for the purposes of the MST Hub. We’ve actually found that the MST Hub does work best with AMD graphics cards in terms of the functionality it offers though we did encounter some initial setting up difficulties which we will briefly discuss. We had issues with our AMD drivers not detecting each display individually and limiting us to 3840×1020 despite having three 1080p capable displays. A simple reinstall of the drivers fixed the problem and so we’d recommend anyone getting the MST Hub with an AMD graphics card should uninstall all previous AMD or Nvidia drivers and then reinstall a fresh set from the AMD website. Once they have been installed then connect up your MST Hub and it should work.

Upon a fresh driver installation of Catalyst 13.4 WHQL and all the extras we started the system up and were greeted with the detection of three independent displays all running at their maximum native resolution.

We were able to keep track of the bandwidth each monitor users via the AMD DisplayPort Diagnostics tab which is activated when you connect more than one display to a DisplayPort connection.

We were able to set up Eyefinity quite easily, though a reboot was required to get it to work.

On connecting a HD 6990 we got an identical result thanks to the HD 6990 also supporting Display Port 1.2 HBR2 with MST. That said all HD 6000 series graphics cards with a DisplayPort 1.2 HBR2 MST compatible port will be able to run the same set up. One thing that we found worth mentioning is that a lot of AMD graphics cards use mini-DP connectors at the output end, so you may need to purchase a mini-DP to full sized DP adapter to use the MST hub. I would of liked to see Club3D include this with the package especially as they target mainly AMD users and most AMD cards use mini-DP outputs.