even in canada it is like 100 bucks more
I have been looking at benchmarks for the 5870 for the last two days looking to see if i will upgrade to it. It beats the 295 in a good bit of thigns, yes the 295 on average is better, but i suspect, like has been said. Driver updates will allow it to utilize the hardware more efficiently and it will step ahead. The 5870 is a **** good card put out by ati. With nvidia's new gpu's being more focused on computer and super computer clusters rather then gaming i suspect that they will be disappointing and ati will lead with the 5870 and future cards for quite a while. Yes nvidia has not mentioned if they will put out other models focused on gaming. It is a pretty risky move by nvidia though. Hopefully the cards they put out will atleast hold there ground against ati, but they most likely will be a good bit behind ati this round.
Right now my plan is to build a new pc around January, with out a new gpu, stick with my c216 for another month or so, then get either 1 or 2 5870's. 2 would be over kill, and sadly in the odd thing (i think i seen two benchmarks) the gtx 295 beats crossfire 5870's by one of 2 points/frames. But in everything else that i have seen 2x5870's win be quite a decent margin.
BTW, nice list baez.