What will be better? two 4870's or 4870x2?

In the rig I have in my sig, I was wondering which would be better the single card solution coming out in August the 4870x2 or picking up two 4870 cards in July next week sometime and putting them in crossfire?

Or as an alternative, buying a GTX 280....which I don't want to do because I know the 4870x2 is going to beat it.

So please suggest why the crossfire solution is better or worse than the 4870x2, keeping in mind that I want to use my new computer sometime soon and am leaning towards two 4870 cards early July.

I will be playing at a resolution of 1360x768 as that is the resolution of my HDTV, will this effect my card choice?

I know many people have said you only need two cards if you are going higher resolution, but I want this rig to last a long time so will it be future proof, I know how oxymoronic that sounds but will it?

If I only need a single card solution I will probably get the GTX 280......or the 4870 damn I just don't know. Please help me!!

Wait till they post benchmarks of the 4870's in CF.

I would say two 4870's as they are two independant cards with separate memory.

i say 4870x2 cause it has 2 chips on one PBC so it should work faster?

Really nobody is going to know for sure yet. It was rumored that ATI has some kind of shared/distributed memory controller scheme that could theoretically help performance moreso than two cards in CF. Even without this, the interconnect will be more local so there should be less latency between the cards. Assuming they can keep the clock speeds the same, the 4870X2 could come out very slightly on top with a bigger gain if the rumors about the MC turn out tu be true. We won't really know until the NDA is lifted on the architecture details, or maybe not even until the 4870X2 launch.

Regardless, at such a low resolution, I think more than a single 4870 is overkill, and in my opinion, any dualcard/multiGPU solution is a bad idea for "future proofing" but this is going to boil down to personal preference. If that's the road you want to take, the best option would be to buy a single HD4870 and then wait to buy the second one until the price is much lower. I would be surprised to see CF yield any benefit at that resolution though until much farther down the line.

If it comes down to a contest between the HD4870 and the GTX280, an important thing to keep in mind for future proofing is that the HD4k series is showing a very small loss when enabling AA. So while the GTX280 may give higher framerates now, the 4870 could let you game at higher settings for a longer period of time game-development wise. I'm not sure to what extent this will be relevant at your resolution, however. I dare say that I think the HD4870 is a vastly more cost-effective solution because for half the price both cards are going to give you more than playable framerates.

X2 for obvious reasons, QuadFire

Well, the benchmarks of 4870's in CF are already available, Anandtech did a bunch of games with them versus Nvidia's lineup. You'd be ******** not to take the X2 though, it's less power consumption than 4870's in CF, and CF doesn't always scale well with games.

I ATI was going to allow Octa-fire? (4x 4780X2)

Depends on how large mainboard companies decide to let their products become. The expansion slots are crammed enough as it is, imagine 4 PCI-E slots. Not pretty.

I think that would be a huge waste anyways because 4 4850s arent scaling well at all.