Well you wouldn't, but EVGA certainly does.
Check out the
product's webpage:
4 Monitors. 3D Surround. 2 GPUs. One graphics card -> That's their tag line.
And then check the specs for those benchmarks they took against the GTX580.
3DMark11 is running with the "Performance" settings and the Unigine bench is running at
1440x900.
If they had to lower the quality settings that much to get a performance overhead from a GTX580, then this 2WIN card is clearly lacking in memory amount.
If that happens, then the card will definitely be more expensive than a single GTX580 (but also substantially faster in almost every situation, of course).
Yea I really don't think EVGA thought this one through.
GTX 460 SLI is pretty even with a single GTX 580 in terms of performance. It's got faster avg. fps in most games, but also lower min fps as well, at around 1920x1200 resolution. Only plus is providing the same performance as a GTX 580 for substantially cheaper ($350~ vs $500).
GTX 460 1gb has already been shown to be bottlenecked by the memory size at resolution 2560x1600 (4 million pixels), so by not putting 2gb (per GPU) of RAM on this card and then marketing it as a solution to multi-monitor setups, EVGA has set this card up for fail. Most common surround solutions are 3x 1680x1050 (5.3 million pixels) and 3x 1920x1200 (6.9 million pixels), so this card will definitely be limited by the RAM. That's not even counting 3x 30" setups, whatever cards powering those monitors need to render over 12 megapixels!
Also, since this card does not support quad-SLI, there is no upgrade path. This was the one thing that would have made the 2Win a win (har har) over a pair of regular GTX 460s in SLI. Right now a pair of GTX 460s will only cost you $320 (Cheapest on Newegg, not counting the ridiculous Galaxy pair that's $250 after rebate), and will probably perform better than this card. So unless someone doesn't have the PCI-E slot to spare, that would be a better solution. Though to be fair, it's probably mostly Nvidia's fault rather than EVGA's. The SLI connector's there so technically the capability's there, but Nvidia probably won't ever write the drivers for it
If I had to guess, EVGA probably designed this card with 2Purposes (hee hee). One to get rid of excess GTX 460 cores, and two to design a dual GPU card that will cater to a larger market than the GTX 590. With the GTX 590's limited supply and thin profit margin, EVGA is probably only making them due to their close relationship w/ Nvidia. MSI was supposed to be another partner that would produce the GTX 590, but turned down b/c of low supplies and low margins. So now we get EVGA, Asus, and Inno3D
But this card will be obtainable for a much bigger market than the GTX 590, and now EVGA has built a good foundation for a GTX 560 2Win in the future.