Both cards have their good and bad points.
I may go Eyefinity one day, so I would choose the 5970 if I were you, but that's not the only selling factor. I think in overall price/performance ratio it's worth it. At the stated resolution you are playing at 1920x1200, even a single 5870 would perform well. The Ati cards do run cooler and consume less power.
On the other hand a 480 GTX would perform admirably and most likely better than a single 5870 by a certain %. A 5970 vs. a 480 trades blows in some games and in others the 5970 is superior, heat has been an issue for these cards you may want to consider this. You would get the bonus of Physx, which imo I'm not too fussed about considering the number of games it supports. The Nvidia card has a lot going for it, with 3D and that Stereoscopic stuff (which most people probably won't use).
Now, people go on about Tessellation and how Nvidia stomps on ATi with it, from what I've seen on Youtube and the like, a 480 GTX beats the 5970 by 5fps on extreme tessellation if I remember rightly. Let's take a step back and realise that's a benchmark test, not a game. Now let's look at how the game industry is looking at the moment, there are some great dev's trying to push Dx11 and integrated the API. There are also a tonne of lazy devs who just port the console games to PC.
True Dx11 will happen I guess at some point, but the take up appears to be slow. Yes there are devs adding more and more features from it, which is cool, but tessellation integration is little to none. So it's not the biggest selling factor to me.
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