Dual Nvidia or ATI?

[kmatthews24]

Looking into a new desktop setup would it be better to go with:

dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 - 2GB

or

ATI Radeon HD 5870 - 2GB - ASUS ROG MATRIX Design

both come out to around the same price +/- $10.

 

[dividebyzero]

Performance is with the SLI nvidia setup by a large margin. Whether that margin is going to be noticeable depends on the screen resolution you're gaming at.

A couple of other things to take into account are:
Connectivity -extra PCIe power connections involved in multi-card usage
Driver support. If you are the kind of person that needs to play the game on the day it's released then multi-GPU driver profiles (of either SLI or Crossfire) typically lag behind those of single cards. Not an issue if you play the games a couple of weeks after release.