Quote Originally Posted by DarthShader View Post
Thank you for confirming, that the 6970 was not meant to fight the 580.


You should say to that EVGA. They listened to you with their guarantees, maybe they will agree with you here too and drop their dual card.

Joking aside, I am not sure I can agree with you. Part of what makes us currently percieve dual cards as useless is the 32nm cancelation/ 28nm slips which made the single cards come close to the 300W wall. At that point SLI/corssfire makes for both better performance and easier cooling. If nVidia was able to, I can guarantee they'd have a dual card already, 100%.

A dual card can still have it's uses. In the ultra high-end, it's easier to do quadfire with two dual-cards. In the lower regions, depending on pricing, it might be cheaper to get a cheap P67 board that doesn't have two at least x8 slots, a 2500K and a dual card, than an expensive board and two regular cards. There's also the mATX and ITX form factor, where Crossfire/SLI is troublesome or impossible. See Sugo SG07 for example. Finally, there are OpenCL/CUDA applications, where packing twice as much chips in the same space is going to give moar perforamnce etc.

im not going to say dual cards are not cool and have some place, but i dunno about that part. i have not seen any P67 boards without dual 8x slots and if your buying a 600-700 dollar video card your not buying a $125 mobo... and if you are well then you have a thing or two to learn....

now the argument for mATX and miniITX is decent but something like a 5970 can't fit in half of the mid towers on the market without modding let alone most things smaller. MAYBE mATX but then again most good mATX mobos can run a pair of dual slot video cards so normal CFX or SLI is still possible.

the only real use I can see for dual GPU cards is for n00bs with to much money who want 4 GPU's in their system. and good for them but I would take a TRI SLI of 580's any day before a quad 5970 setup as scaling beyond 3 GPU's is questionable at best.

I do think it would be cool to see the GTX 460's offer TRI SLI support but I highly doubt that happening.