Thanks for the explainer, I think the "legacy connections" bit might be a littler over my head technically, but appreciate that that is the bottleneck...
Would be really grateful of you could send me a link to the non apple version of the adapter you mentioned on Amazon or similar.
I barely know what I'm talking about here, but legacy connections are those prior to DisplayPort. For example, VGA DVI HDMI. Legacy connections require an additional hardware clock on the video card,
per legacy connection. The AMD card you have in the nMP has two of these clocks, therefore you can support two legacy connections. For three or more monitors, two can be legacy and the rest will have to be DisplayPort (or Thunderbolt). The second AMD card in the nMP is compute-only and therefore has no output connectors.
A
passive adapter doesn't have this clock. So while it can convert the physical connector from DisplayPort/Thunderbolt on your nMP to DVI, it relies on a clock on the card. That's why you're stuck at two monitors with passive adapters and/or legacy connections.
An
active adapter does have this clock. This makes it more expensive than a passive adapter. Every monitor with a legacy connection, after the first two, will require an active adapter.
What MVC is saying is that a lot of his clients stick with HDMI or DVI because that's what they know and then they end up trying to adapt that, when in fact there's actually a DisplayPort on the monitor and they should have just used that in the first place.
As a former desktop support guy, and still the support guy for everyone in my family, I have frequently seen people use the worst possible connection to their monitor because they just want to use the same cable they've been using forever.
