Graphics upgrade time

[Jonnygrunge]

Hi All, Hope you all had a Merry Xmas and will have a merrier New year!

My setup (see sig) is still serving me well, although I think my nearly 3 year old 6950(70) crossfire setup needs an upgrade. It is beginning to struggle with modern games. I have already purchased a 12GB performance RAM upgrade, so VGA is next in line.
I currently game on my Sammy 24" at 1920x1200, but looking towards an Eyefinity setup in the future.
I am really swaying towards the MSI Radeon R9-280X TwinFrozr Gaming OC cards, 2 in crossfire. These cards are being well reviewed with a great quiet aftermarket cooler, factory OC out of the box!, and an OC of 1196MHz and 7200MHz on the RAM was reported in the review These cards seem to provide a great "bang for your buck" with crossfire setting you back, around £500, a single R9-290X is around £450, they appear to scale very well, and have full support for Mantle. They will completely annihilate the mighty Titan!, and outperform the single 290X. I know the R9 280X is a rebranded HD 7970GHz Edition GPU, but hey, NVidia have been doing it for years!
Any thoughts?

 

[a66as]

If i was in your shoes id try a single non ref 290 first, should be more than powerful at 1920x1200. you will also have the option to crossfire it later down the line

 

[Uncle Petey]

I'd take two 280's over a single 290 unless I was looking at adding another 290 down the line.

 

[Qitarah]

Single 290pro non reference, save up and Xfire it later.

 

[alex_123_fra]

I would go for a single 290 or GTX780 at that res and then Crossfire/SLI later. 280X is great but not new tech and in 1-2 years, you won't have any path to upgrade it unless you go tri-fire. Sell what you have and buy a single card while saving up to get a second in 2014 I'd say.