As mentioned in previous threads, I'm about to purchase a new PC (running windows 7, 64 bit, 16GB RAM, SSDs, Cubase 6.5, BFD, waves, LASS, Ivory etc.) from one of the specialist music PC builders (which builder is yet to be decided!). It's important that whatever I get can deliver ultra reliable low latency performance.

Just thinking about mobos and processors... I am drawn to the Intel i7-2600 processor but I do recall reading that that there were problems marrying the RME PCI card (which accompanies my Multiface 2) with some mobos due to lack of native PCI support, and I think perhaps with Sandy Bridge in general. Does anyone know any more about all this? If it came to it, I could just buy the RME PCIe card but of course I'd rather avoid the expense!

The PC packages I'm presently looking at use one of the following motherboards: Gigabyte Z68, Asus P8H77-V or Asus P8Z77-V LE. I'm wondering if any one of those is likely to work better with my Multiface 2/PCI.

Any opinions/thoughts welcome.

All i7's (and i5's, i3's) of that generation and after work on motherboards that use a bridged PCI as standard.

However if you get the right board this can still actually perform well (different BIOS and board revisions can throw this off though!)

The card we've found will not quite work correctly is the RME Madi (although probably the same for any MADI PCI card) it got very close (2x cards, 72 tracks but totalmix GUI could not be on the screen without issues) but couldn't quite do it. There are native PCI boards for these i7s however they are not produced in great numbers and are harder and harder to find. Gigabyte do some but whenever we've ordered we've not been able to source from the UK

Hope this helps.

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Well I would have thought that the specialist builders could take PCI compatibility into account if you discuss with them before you order, but yes most SB boards don't support PCI natively.

I found this out the hard way as a self builder that purchased a Gigabyte P67A board, although my issue was more annoying than terminal.

I had 2 PCI cards at the time - a UAD-1 and TC Powercore PCI MK2.

The UAD worked okay and any issue I had didn't seem to be linked to this, the TC on the other hand worked ok if the plugins where allowed to run in the background with no GUI's open. Opening the plugin window caused drop outs when you changed controls in real time.

I also suffered random crashes and start failures, and don't get me started on the Liquid Mix which just refused to work reliably at all

Once I removed the TC all problems ceased (except with the liquid mix which went straight on the bay)

It kinda worked, but not reliably, so I offloaded them both and went native to replace the TC and got a UAD2 duo to replace the UAD-1.

All fine now

It is still possible to make good use of PCI cards, given mobo and driver support. Practically, nothing else in a PC is tied to the PCI bus anymore, so nothing else in the system contends for bandwidth on the bus.

Functionally, the HDSPe (PCIe) host card offers nothing over the HDSP (PCI) version beyond PCIe connectivity:
<a href="/sos/jan06/articles/applenotes.htm" target="_blank">http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan06/articles/applenotes.htm</a>

None of the mobos you mentioned offer 'native' PCI support, which is really what you should be specifying.

For an SB mobo with 'native' PCI support, look for a Q67 PCH board.

For an SB/IB mobo with 'native' PCI, look for a Q77 or B75 PCH board. A number of B75 ATX boards are offered by several mobo makers, with 3 or 4 PCI slots. There are also a number of smaller micro-ATX B75 boards available, but with fewer PCI slots.

So, you have options if you want to keep using your PCI card.

(seems it's too late to edit my earlier post, so...)

Almost forgot, still another (and rather more expensive) option might be an X79 mobo (for Skt 2011 i7 SB-E), as the X79 does actually support native PCI, although few X79 mobo's equip any PCI slots at all, and of those few I've come across that do it's only a single slot.

Thanks for all the replies. Much appreciated.

The builder with whom I've just placed an order is going to use the Gigabyte Z68 + 2600k with my existing PCI card. His experience has been that this works fine.

Hope things work out. Do let us know how you get on.

Btw, just came across this related discussion on the RME forum which may be of interest (in case you hadn't already seen it):

http://www.rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=12432

Thanks Goddard. I suspect all will be fine with my setup but it wouldn't be the end of the world for me to get a PCIe card if necessary...