Dual video cards, SLI and Crossfire, are a gimmick put forward by the graphics card companies. Many, many games do not benefit from having two video cards run at the same time, and certainly do not run twice as fast (though you pay twice as much).
That said, if you have the money then you should go for a 4870 X2 2GB card. Not the 1GB. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010380048%20106792627%201067940679&name=Radeon%20HD%204870%20X2 You're talking about going multimonitor etc. so I'm assuming you will be using widescreen monitors, so you will benefit from the added memory when you try to push games at 1680 and higher resolution with Anti-Aliasing. For single card solutions, you may want to look at the Nvidia 280 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=NVIDIA+280&x=0&y=0 That's just about the fastest single card solution out there right now. You will notice that these represent the high end. The 4850 is good, but doesn't outperform a Nvidia 260. If a Single Card solution is faster than your dual card solution, go with the single card. And in this case a SINGLE 260 is faster than Two 4850s, but that single 260 will give you that fast performance in each and every game you play, whereas there are some titles where you will not get the benefit of that second 4850 or you may need to wait for driver updates to add support. Here are some comparisons, higher is better http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-charts-q3-2008/compare,801.html?prod[2253]=on&prod[2060]=on&prod[2062]=on&prod[2114]=on&prod[2116]=on You typically want above 30fps, and over 60fps on average is ,of course, the grail. For a dual card I would go with the single 4870 X2 (2GB) which is two cards in one. For a single card I would go with the Nvidia 280 or the Nvidia 260. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to date Get the Free Trial http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;207172674;29440083;f Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:284311 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
