5870 1gb Xfired Vs single 6970 2gb, for eyefinity

Xfire doesn't count all that much for me because until AMD pulls their head out of their butts I have to play in windowed mode across my three screens because of PLP.

I am in the exact boat you are in right now myself. I am going to go ahead and get the 6970 with the 7XXX series looking aways out still.

The 5870's are more powerful but the 2GB will help with the extra pixles and the 6970 can support up to 6 screens off of one card where my 5870 EAH does not. I have the money so I will make the jump to the 6970 and after the 5870's sell I will buy another then and be back at X-firing them.

i guess it comes down to..are you running out of vram? if you are the 2gb card will be better in that situation. Either that or drop the texture detail or draw distances to gain back some memory on your current setup. the 2 5870's are faster though when they arent running out of ram..... you can see in this review http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-6950-6970-review/2... the 2gb 6970 makes 40fps average on bfbc2 2560*1600r res, lower than what your running, so you can expect less. I would hold out for crossfire 6950's for that setup, you can also flash a 6950 to 6970 with a BIOS flash.

I was looking at going that route with the 6950's because of their X-fire scalability but rumor had it though that the 6950's were going to have the Bios upgrade blocked somehow. Can anybody confirm?

It hasn't happened YET. If it does, Radeon allows mismatched Crossfiring, so you could just get a 6970 to crossfire down the road anyways.
And MAN, your 5870 sale is tempting...but I don't game enough to pull the trigger on it. Also, my PSU can handle more.

Wow just looking at a couple of reviews the 6950 X-fired has better performance then the 5870 x-fired.

I figured two 5870's for 300.00 (+shipping) was a steal and somebody would have jumped all over them but I guess not.

The 6000 series has better crossfire scaling. But the 5870's are still amazing for anyone with less than a triple monitor setup (or single super high res).

If I was tekn0mega, I'd buy your $300 5870 sale though. He's not beating that deal.

Well, Im not sure how it is something is for sale to me in the first place. Especially since I already have x-fired 5870's!!! (you lost me there)

All I really want to know, is for the purposes of Eyefinity, should I stick with my xfired 1gb 5870's, or am I stuttering with SSAO etc because I really ought to have card w/ 2gb, like the 6970.

Or would I notice such a small difference that I should just keep the money in my wallet and wait for the NEXT big thing.

I was thinking the same thing but wasn't going to go there. Are you noticing anything at your current resolution that would lead you to believe you are running out of memory? Flickering/stuttering as you say?

I have made the decision to go ahead and move over to a pair of 6950's as they are a pretty good combo and will do the 4 monitor support on one card like I need.

Well, it chugs a bit on three monitors. Smokes about everything on one. But where is the fun in that?

W/ 3 monitors, it gets bogged down noticeably with SSAO shading and heavily particle effect sequences (explosions and stuff) when playing Just Cause 2, or Empire total war.

Only a few FPS drop in Shogun total war, but once they patch the broken AA and shader 3.0-4.0 options (currently cannot turn these option on in game), I'm betting it will get even worse fps then Empire TW.

I wonder if my VRAM is the reason for this. Conventional knowledge would lead me to think that 1gb vram on xfire will have some diminishing returns on an eyefinity system. I'm assuming 2gb, even if not Xfired, would possibly out perform my current eyefinity performance. Am I right or wrong here?

At this rate I am thinking I will need to go out and buy a 2gb 6970 just to do my own bench mark tests. Unless I can get a definitive answer from somebody else.