[Masaki 7-11]

My ranking with the HD6870s was the next bar past the middle of the pack, probably because I have slightly overclocked cards. I could probably increase my score a little by overclocking my CPU more (or my video cards for that matter), but I have a "silent case" with sound-dampening foam on the sides and few areas where air can flow through, so I can't really handle bigger temperatures than I have now and remain at a comfortable level (CPU goes to 59-60C during 1Hr of Prime 95 with 8 threads) and Video Cards stay in the low 70Cs.

I think Intel made the Sandy Bridge (LGA1155) socket have reduced PCIe lanes (only 16 from what i've read) to make it less viable for High End multi-gpu configurations so that their X58 platform (LGA 1366) would still be a viable choice, given that most Sandy Bridge processors are on par or above LGA 1366 processors for lower price.

I think with the new X79 platform, they will have true 2 x 16 lanes (perhaps even PCIe 3.0, though I've read that initially it may only be PCIe 2.0), so that should work out quite well for High-End multi-gpu configurations.

From what I've read my HD6870s pretty much fully use 8x 2.0 lanes and are a little bottlenecked by it (saw some benchmarks where moving from 8x to 16x increased performance by a few percent), so I'd imagine the cards you have right now would run a fair bit faster if they had more bandwidth available.