After careful consideration, taking into account that this DAW can easily switch to Vista at some future time.
Asus, Abit, MSI, Gigabyte, Foxconn, Tyan and Supermicro have followed the Intel game plan by eliminating PCI slots. Not only are they dropping to a 2 slot design, but one of those slots is even pushed over to the side, where it can't allow a full length card to be installed due to it's placement where the DIMM slots block that. Supermicro use to have the DIMM slots parallel to the PCI slots which was great, as my rear case fan perfectly lined up.
This has caused me to break my loyalty w/ Intel / Supermicro, and stray to an enthuiast's board, DFI. These guys are a small company that has always released early, and stable OC'd BIOS's as they are considered the gamers choice.
It's design will use a 3 x PCI 32bit layout with easy access to the Full Length Scope cards.
It will have the X38 chipset that supports DDR2 low latency RAM, and can be tweaked to run @ 1333 MHz. with CL2 or 3 . The X48 chipset will be a DDR3 / 1600MHz F.S.B. solution, which IMO is unecessary for audio. Live performance demands are how I base my opinions. Since I play and load a dozen large libraries and instuments already w/ minimal muli core support, and regular CL4 settings, this should give me 30-40% increase. So unless you are recording 24 audio tracks, w/ 24 MIDI'd VSTi's simultaneously, DDR2 @ 1333Mhz will be fine.
Gigastudio 4 / GVI 4 can run at XP 32 bit, XP 64 bit, and Vista 32 / 64 bit. So if Soniccore releases Vista drivers, cool. If they don't, cool.
This design will carry me for the next 5 years so I aim on doing it right. I have the choice of dropping Scope for an all hardware rig, w/ a Giga DAW down the road, unless they go to PCI-e, in which case, I will always be broke.
Gigastudio 4 will host VSTi's now, and comes out with a strong showing yesterday at the AES 121 in NYC. Multi-core support with SSE4 and 64bit make it a very attractive package. In my experiences with Gigastudio through the years, one needed a very fast memory sub-system. I chose low latency RAM, 3ms @ 44.1KHz on my cards, Raptor HDD's w/ their 16MB of cache, and always opted for a CPU w/ large L2 cache. This started with the 1MB 1.4GHz PIII Tualitin on a Supermicro years ago. These days the Raptors low access times of 5 msec.'s is no biggie, as low CL timings, and large L2 CPU cache easily smoke a HDD's access times, however the HDD cache level must be 16MB especially w/ large sample libraries. I will be using 500GB HDD's w/ 16MB cache that have a higher transfer rate, and of course hold more content.
However to be a good Scope DAW 3 x 32bit PCI slots is imperative. After careful consideration and research this is a necessary selection, as our choices are diminishing with the new PCI-e 2.0 designs.
This DAWg will hunt until the death of 32bit Scope cards. But the Body Of Ralf will remain in Duetschland through the current decade.