I happened to get my hands on another 5870 so I thought I'd pop that in too. I have both GPUs turning up in cgminer (after a little trouble, but 'aticonfig -f --adapter=all --initial' worked wonders.
I have cgminer 2.8.7 (same behavior with 2.8.5), AMD SDK 2.7 and Catalyst 12.10.
If I only enable one GPU, I get the hashrate as before. If I enable both GPUs, the first GPUs hashrate plummets. Net result is I'm still only getting the same hashrate but now it's 'using' both GPUs.
e.g.
GPU 0: ~400Mh
GPU 1: OFF
to
GPU 0: ~100Mh
GPU 1: ~300Mh