I had Asus 5970 for a week. I'd say, that unless you going to water cool it, stay away from it. Under heavy load (Furmark) it was overheating even on stock settings, downclocking the GPU to 500MHz or so which makes whole thing useless from my point of view. It is know problem with power regulators not being cooled properly on those cards. I sold it and grabbed two 5870 instead. Better performance and they stay cooler. On the other hand if you are going to water cool 5970 I am sure this card would perform awesome and would be much more cost efficient comparing to 2x 5870. Most likely it would outperform 2x 5870s in OC a bit too. Also there should be taken in consideration fact that 2x 5870 use x16 PCIe slot per GPU and 5970 uses only x8 PCIe per GPU. I have no idea how significant is the performance impact though.