ATI 6970 vs nVidia 5700/580?

I recently bought a new rig, and am very happy, unfortunately, my MSI 6970 2gb lightning GPU was not working, and had to be returned. I was devastated as I had read excellent reviews and the OC'd card was looking good over the nVidia 570 Phantom 1280Mb (mainly from recommendations from here regarding vram).

The supplier, Aria, have agreed to refund me the cost of the card as there doesn't seem to be any 6970 lightnings around any more, and the other Sapphire 6970 doesn't have anywhere near the same speed, cooling or noise reduction (silence is important to me).

So now I am stuck; do I wait for more lightnings to come out, go with a lower model "reference" 6970 from sapphire, or look at the 570/580? Will the loss in vram be noticed if I only 5 box? would a 1280Mb card be enough?

I am 5 boxing WoW currently with a i5 2500K OC @ 4.4ghz, 16gb ram, SSD, and my old nVidia 9600 GT 512Mb (actually is smooth in wow - but at minimum on slaves on second screen and good on main). To be fair it is all at DX9 currently, and I would love to try DX11.

Thanks and usual for your sage advices :D

I think the general rule is stay away from MSI regardless of which GPU it has.

personally, if you are going to buy just 1 card. I would just pony up for 580 GTX. No reason to save on graphics for new rig. If you plan to add a second card (for other games that support SLI), then I would stay with 6970. Wait for lightning if you have to.

6970 crossfire > 570 sli slightly. and it give you more vram. also its cheaper.

do they have this ? "Asus HD 6970 Direct CUII". its near 580 GTX's performance level.

either way, your machine is overkill for 5 box. my i7 920 + GTX 295 (yes 295!) is enough for 5 boxing,even though only 1 out of the 2 GPU for 295 is working.

If you're only 5-boxing, any GTX5xx or 6970 will be overkill. Most of the folks who are touting the larger VRAM cards are 10+ boxing. Granted, you may not be able to run all 5 at ultra but considering people still 5-box on Q6600 machines, I think you're probably good to go.