That article looks like pure hackery. I'm almost positive the price on that card will be closer to the cost of a pair of GTX 480's than a single GTX 480, yet they only bench it against one 480. It may even be the same or more. I paid $910 after cashback for a pair of 480s and I wouldn't be surprised to see a $900-$1000 msrp on that card with it only being sold by places where you can't get a discount.
I already had a 5870+5970 setup running at nearly the speed of that card (875/1200) so I'll tell you all what the real questions to ask about it are.
-The 5xxx series seems to choke in multigpu configs when it's asked to do a lot. There are times on the FC2 bench where my setup would drop from 100+ fps to single digits at 2560 8xAA. It also chokes really badly in BC2 when people bust out with smoke grenades. You can see some of this on the High Quality AA/AF test. Even at only 1920 8xAA in FC2, a single GTX 480 kills the Toxic 5970 on minimum frames. So the real question is if there's some kind of architectural limitation on the 5xxx series. In fact, this is why I'm breaking up my setup. Beforehand I thought it might just be that 1GB wasn't enough, but this graph makes it seem like there's limit that can't be fixed with just more memory.
-Second issue is how overclockable this card is. It will be interesting to see if there's even any difference in the max potential of this vs a stock 5970. Otherwise a lot of people will be better served with the normal 5970. My experience was that OCed, it had just about the right amount of power to churn the stuff that could fit into 1GB. But then add more power from the 5870 crossfired and there wasn't enough memory to hold what the cards were theoretically capable of. So here we have 2GB per core, but at the resolutions/AA that will take advantage of 2GB this card may not be powerful enough to keep minimums above 60 in a lot of games.
It's still an interesting card, hell I might grab one myself if it's $700-$800. I could easily ebay the 480s for more than I paid, but I don't think the Toxic will be $700-$800. And if I did that I'd definitely want a 2GB 5870 for trifire. Otherwise, those numbers it's posting by itself aren't anything a garden variety oced 5970 can't do. If it's close to $1000 for this card vs $1000 for a pair of 480s, I think that's an easy choice. The 480s will already pwn it slightly even with beta drivers and I think that lead will increase once they improve. The 5970 drivers were terrible at release but they've reached the point of diminishing returns now so what you see is what you get.
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