About a year ago I purchased the Club 3D Radeon™ HD 7870 jokerCard. Over time I’ve been purchasing new monitors and this week I purchased a third one. All monitors can be connected through DVI or HDMI (or VGA, but that isn’t supported by the card). My PC runs Windows 7.

Using two monitors is no problem, but when I try to enable a third monitor in the ‘Screen resolution’ window it says ‘Unable to save display settings’. While searching for a solution I found the following website. One user states that “The DVI port which is next to HDMI both share the same signal so you cannot use them both at the same time, ie. you can either use both DVI ports or one DVI and one HDMI for 2 displays. So for 3 displays you would want to use either dual DVI or DVI/HDMI plus display port for the third monitor.”

Based on my tests (I can use any two ports, but not three at the same time) I am quite certain the above statement is correct, but before I purchase a miniDisplayPort adapter I’d like to see the above statement confirmed.

Also, if the above analysis is correct, there remains some confusion about the active vs. passive DisplayPort adapters. Some say only old cards require an active adapter, but I’m unsure if that applies to this card. If I am to purchase an adapter, will I need an active one, or will a passive one do too?

Thanks in advance for your help.