@googlebot :

I assume you are mining just for fun or shits n giggles. You mention you only have one HD5870 and solomine, good for you.

Alot of us do not try and achieve the gambling man orgasm while mining for bitcoins, alot of us have legit reasons for running their miners as a business with realistic daily/weekly and monthly income projections. It would be a self destructive decision for alot of users on a big pool to move into solo mining.

Most important part about solomining that seems to be overlooked regarding the higher variance is the fact that the higher variance isnt on a scale of 1-10 with pooled mining at 2 and solomining on 8. As the difficulty increase, the variance gap between pooled and solo increases even further thus the statistical variance being discussed here would reset at every difficulty increase and the gap between pooled mining and solomining just keeps widening. This wouldnt be the case if every difficulty increase also came with higher payout per block but that is obviously not the case cause it would be counter intiative with regards to difficulty increase. Also it variance wouldnt increase if you increase your solomining hardware to counter the difficulty increases, then you could keep adding the probabilities of variance from one difficulty to the other.

Pooled mining takes mostly care of this on the bigger pools, at every difficulty increase the mining pools see an increase in hashing power. Solo miners typically dont get more hashing power for every difficulty increase.

That said, if I had atleast 20% of deepbit's hashing power for myself then I might consider soloming, even then it would be riskier outcome than sticking with deepbit/btcguild or slushpool simply cause of the hashing numbers game available on these pools.

So my conclusion, solomining on a realistic timeframe will on average produce less BTC for miners than pooled mining and thats why I agree with the wiki's statement about this.