Stepping it up a notch
Extreme GPUs need to be measured at extreme settings, so we crank up three of our games to 8xAA to see how well our graphics cards can cope.
DiRT 2, Far Cry 2 and H.A.W.X with 8xAA confirm that Sapphire's HD 5970 TOXIC 4GB is unsurprisingly quicker than reference. Unfortunately for Sapphire, dual HD 5870 cards appear to scale better, offering greater performance in certain scenarios.
In summary, dual HD 5870s will offer similar performance for £100 less, whilst dual GTX 480s will offer the very best performance for around £80 more.
In order to make sense, Sapphire's solution needs to play on the potential single-card advantages, namely temperatures and noise.
