PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

i just found this MoBo:

Asrock X58DX

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?M ... %20Deluxe3
http://xtreview.com/addcomment-id-7833- ... eluxe.html

it has 1366 chipset and 3 PCI slots

any experience with 3 creamware cards??

If it is a board that is relatively new it should be OK. ASRock are notorious for cheap boards, but they don't overdo their designs with bells and whistles, but since the X58's are being brushed aside now with Sandy Bridge, all X58's will be pretty mature and cheap too.

I have finally finished reading all of my brochures and hoopla from the CES show, and the Sandy Bridge is a really great CPU, but I juist cant see giving up Triple Channel RAM, and the whole GPU / CPU sharing resources is some thing that I am not so sure of.

My Core2Duo couldn't handle Kontakt very well even when the CPU was at 50%. I kept trying different ULLI settings, faster RAM, etc. Nothing was working, but my gig was cool, this was for recording high polyphony with multiple instruments simultaneously.
Then I tried the i3/i5 builds and they just had too many issues with the memory controller and graphics card fighting.
So next up was my first i7 X58 w/ Triple Channel RAM..................BAMMM !!!!! Right away I could run 64 samples @ 44.1 and use 1.7msec. High poly, but stacks caused some issues.
But I found out that went away with some OS, and IRQ tweaks.

Whether or not Sandy Bridge and all of its GPU hoopla will work for heavy sampling apps isn't known yet. But Intel fell behind with their GPU fixes that were an issue on the Clarksdales. So just to keep their promises they released SBridge with a few old hangovers from the i5.

I would love to see how well they work, but right now I have incredible RAM loads and sampling heaven for the first time in 26 years of using samplers. I am not about to give that up fpor anything. As a matter of fact PC's are moving away from audio more and more, and if that continues we might all be using Macs or high end PC server boards.

I'd go with any 3 x PCI X58 though, as we know they all work really well after 2 years of maturity

New Sandy Bridge quads actually look great for audio that isn't memory bound (softsynths) but sample streaming is going to be x58 territory until x68/z68 (or w/e) shows up with Ivy Bridge this fall...