Where Is Real Benefit In Crossfire?

[Gildor57]

I am about to put together a new i7-920 based system. I find myself in possession of two 5870's. My heavy hitting applications are:

Photo editing of raw photo files (10-15 MB each)
Video editing/encoding/transcoding
Occasional game
Multi-tasking with all of the above.

So the question is do I keep both or sell one of them. I am not going for absolute money savings here, so it won't break me financially if I keep both, but on the other hand, I don't want to throw money away if the benefit is minuscule (I have no interest in "bragging rights").

A couple of other things:
The cards will be driving a 1920x1200 25.5" Asus monitor.
I may upgrade to a i9 if Intel ever puts one out that is not insanely expensive, and I will likely be keeping this system awhile. This new system is replacing a 5 year old P4-based system.

 

[Yuriman]

The 2nd card will increase your framerate in games, but I don't think there are many games that stress a single 5870 at 1920. I'm fairly certain your video card has very little to do with photo editing, and the encoders that use videocard hardware are very limited.

 

[sgrinavi]

That you thought about selling them both and getting a Quadro CX ?

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_quadro_cx_us.html

 

[exar333]

Sell one and keep the other.

 

[tweakboy]

Sell it for 300 bones. Count me in.

 

[Gildor57]

Thanks for all the replies. Its about what I thought, but I wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything. I don't game enough to have the increased framerate be worth it to me. I am just a shade tree photographer/video type, so the Quadro CX suggestion, while interesting, is out of my league.

ebay, here I come!