After struggling with my current Intel Core2duo E6600 based audio PC for 5 years i’m currently looking into updating CPU, mainboard and RAM. So far, my first choice is Intels new Sandy Bridge i7 2600 CPU, 8 gb RAM and, errr, some mainboard (obviously). Everytime i’ve been updating my PC hardware in the past, the mainboard question wasn’t easy to answer. You might think it should be easy to find a good mainboard, but given the trouble i’ve with my ASUS P5B-E deluxe carrying the E6600 one shouldn’t consider this being such a no-brainer…

They said the P5B-E dlx is a fantastic board. I couldn’t say else, it’s feature-packed, comes with bells and whistles. Unfortunately i was never able to establish a stable OS at low latencies (<12ms) using a RME Audio HSDP RPM/Multiface. No matter if Windows XP, 7, 32 or 64bit, Ableton Live or Buzztracker. I ran Everest stress tests, checked the RAM with memtest thoroughly, Latency checker didn’t reveal jack shit either.

So, it’s 2011 now and i’m looking for a mainboard again. Searching google, browsing forums, reading mailinglists. No 100% certain answer yet. What i found out is that the best choices for i7 2600 based daw’s in terms of mainboards come from Gigabyte, MSI and Intel themselves.

Further findings (always keep in mind, i’m looking in conjunction with RME audio interfaces!):

• Asus P8P67 gets recommended quite often, but several issues have been reported so far (links to the RME forum, 10+ problems all over the place in various threads…)
• Asus cheap runoff ASrock doesn’t offer any stable solutions either.
• Gigabytes GA-H67A-UD3H gets mentioned a lot so far, but i couldn’t yet find any reports that it really works well

I guess that’s not too much info to start with, if you’re building a Sandy Bridge based i7 system running an audio interface from RME and optionally an UAD dsp card, please share your experiences! This post will be updated with any kind of valuable info i’m able to find.

Update #1 (Jan 24th, 2011)

Further stress on the remark that Asus’ boards got trouble with low latency stability. Eventho there seem to be ways to make it work by lots of tweaks. I’ve got some info from Pete at http://www.scan.co.uk/ about motherboard choice etc. Kudos for your help so far, Pete!

Update #2 (Feb 1st, 2011)

Intel’s currently got an issue with their P67 chipset (the one which allows for overclocking) whereas under certain circumstances, the mainboards might degrade over time. That’s a major bummer for me going cross the Sandy Bridge at the moment. Hope they resolve the problem asap. For further info, check out scan.co.uk’s explanation.