How dual GPU cards work in games with known xfire/SLI issues/bugs

Hey guys,

This is more a question for my own curiosity and stems from my recent experiments with heavy Skyrim modding to get more enjoyment out of the game. After applying tons of high-res textures, shading, and lighting effects, I have more or less hit a limit with my sapphire 7970 dual-x card. while it's certainly a nice card, I can only get about an hour or two of decent gaming in before the card more or less craps out and i'll need to give the computer a short break and reboot to keep going. I know this is related to GPU workload because if I just tone down the settings a bit, I can avoid these issues (which is what I do mostly anyway).

So just out of curiosity, how would my system work with something like say a gtx690, or one of the kinda awkward 7970x2 cards? the reason that I would look at a single card solution is because a lot of the mods I run have known crossfire/SLI issues, and I've tested and crashed the game multiple times myself running a pair of 7970s. Now I'm aware that dual card solutions essentially run a crossfire bridge within the same card, but would this in anyway alleviate known crossfire/SLI issues? I'm asking because this doesn't only apply to my skyrim mods, but many other games, especially console ports, are known to have weird issues/bugs when running on two or more cards simply because the games aren't ported/coded to be able to use that kind of system effectively

Thanks in advance!