Need some advice on water cooling

[CalcProgrammer1]

Definitely get the 5870 if you're concerned about heat! The HD5000 series are very power efficient GPU's. They'll still dump out a ton of heat but it is much less than two GTX470's will put out. One 5870 will run pretty much anything at high to full settings on a single monitor. It will also run most games (all but the hardest such as Crysis) across up to 3 monitors in Eyefinity at high settings (everything but Anti Aliasing). Two 5870's will outperform two GTX470's while running cooler and the stock 5870 heatsink/fan is very good on the reference design cards.

nVidia's GTX4 lineup is generally more power hungry and hotter running than previous cards from either side so I would not recommend them for a hot room.

As for the 5870, it OC's very well, pushed mine up 100MHz core, 100MHz memory (as far as ATi Overdrive will allow) with no problem and barely any temperature change. I had to set the fan up to 50% but with a water cooler it shouldn't be an issue. I stay under 70C (in a cool room under 60C) while gaming at that fan speed which is good for a long lasting setup. The HD5870 (standard edition, not Eyefinity 6 Edition) can drive up to 3 monitors though you will need a DisplayPort monitor or active adapter for the third. With 2 DVI cables and a DP-VGA adapter I am running 3 1920x1080 monitors off one 5870 and it works very well. They can be configured as split monitors for multitasking or grouped into one large monitor for gaming and switching between setups is easy.

 

[heister]

thanks for the insight, the dual cards was really due to the fact that I have been out of the building scene for quite a while and back when I was building vcards could only out put 2 signals

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

The 5870 can do 3 signals or the Eyefinity 6 edition can do 6 signals (all DisplayPort though, so you'd need 6 MiniDP to VGA or MiniDP to DVI active adapters to run 6 non DisplayPort monitors). If you don't need the extra performance for gaming then just go with the 5870. I also don't think you can actually use all the monitor ports on an nVidia SLI setup (nVidia users, please correct me if I'm wrong). Last I read, an SLI setup only lets you use the outputs on one card when in SLI mode. On the HD5000 cards this isn't the case (though I am still unsure if you can make an Eyefinity group across two cards, they may have added it in newer drivers). I do know you can at least use the second card's outputs for individual monitors.

 

[heister]

I know when you are running your active sli bridge you can only use the display ports on a single card however I have been finding info on ways to leave the bridge in place but de activate it so you can use a larger aray from both cards