Superb multi-card scaling is part of the reason why Tom’s Hardware editors have used AMD graphics hardware in every System Builder Marathon machine this year, a fact that may have escaped die-hard AMD fans who've missed seeing the company's CPUs compete up at the top of the spectrum.

And yet, just because we've doted on AMD's graphics-oriented value doesn't mean the company enjoys performance superiority. The fact remains that Nvidia has the most powerful GPU around in its GeForce GTX 580. The only reason we've shied away from its high-performance flagship up until now was that the cost of other necessary system components gobbled up our budget first. That is, until today.