Are two radeon 6950's in sli better than a single GTX580?

i an building a gaming PC and having difficulty with deciding on the GPU. This PC will be mostly for playing battlefield 3 on Ultra settings. i have a budget of 1800 AU for the computer (not including a monitor, keyboard or mouse) and a overall budget of 2500 AU for everything including monitor, keyboard, mouse and a headset. apart from the GPU these are the other parts of the PC.



Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz

MSI P67A-GD53 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX UEFI BIOS

Thermaltake Black Widow W0319RU 850 Watt

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Model F3-12800CL9D-8GBRL

Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s

Thermaltake Frio

Silverstone RV02B-EW Silent Full Tower

please tell me what GPU i should get and if i should change any of the above parts thankyou.|||If I were you, I would wait less than a month. AMD's set to announce their new high end graphics card December 22 with mass shipment in early January. Rumor has it they're at least 30% faster than the 6970 (or about 20% faster than a 580), and is on par with a 6990, which is roughly equivalent to 6950s in crossfire.



I have 2 6850s in crossfire, and I would much rather have a 6950, 6970, or GTX 570 even if they have less power. Now, the 580 is outrageously priced, and a single 6950 is close to a GTX 580. In that case, crossfire makes more sense. The 6900 series is also better suited to crossfire.





So, if you HAVE to get a rig now, get 2 6950s in crossfire. But I would wait until December 22nd if I were you, as the 7970 will likely drive 6950 and 580 prices down no matter how good it is.|||The Radeons will get you better performance, yes. But the GeForces will get you much better drivers, PHysX and Cuda. I know AMD has a similar solution in GPGPU, but seriously, I've seen far more CUDA/PhysX programs out there than even programs with the AMD label.



Plus, one Graphics card has better effecieny/power ratio than two. And a 2-card solution might date rather quickly. At least you could still save up for another GTX580