Value and Conclusion

A tandem of two Radeon HD 6950 cards in CrossFire can achieve excellent performance levels that easily surpass AMD's aging HD 5970 dual card and also beat NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 by over 25%. Especially in higher resolutions like 2560x1600 we see the gap widen. 2560x1600 should be considering the entry level resolution for a setup like this, ranging well into the higher EyeFinity resolutions.
With a total price of about $600 for both cards, the price tag is certainly something to think twice about before making a quick buying decision. That $600 do get you more performance for the money than any other single high-end graphics cards available today. However, due to the dual card configuration, handling of such a setup is a bit more complicated than working with just one card. You have to ensure your motherboard has the proper slot configuration and that you have enough power supply connectors at your disposal. Also any multi-GPU solution is more driver dependant in delivering its peak performance than a single card. Without proper application profiles for CrossFire the card might end up performing only as fast as a single card. AMD has adressed this and releases CCC Performance Profiles on a weekly basis to ensure you have the latest available to you in short release intervals.
Also this review sheds some light on the viability of a future dual-GPU HD 6990 design from AMD which certainly seems to have the steam available to claim a performance and price/performance leadership position when combined into a single graphics card.