> Which motherboard?

I am a long time ProTools on Mac user, and also have many PCs. I have an HD3 Accel system in a G5 and things are pretty troublesome with 7.3.1 these days. Also storage is a shortfall because it only has ports for 2 interal SATA drives and no extra ports for external SATA. I don't want to expand any further with FireWire ATA (I am at 4 Terabytes of drives already). I frequently run out of DSP when mixing and also own a 2 more HD Process Cards that are doing nothing so I would like to get the 5 cards working together, but an expansion chassis is up there ($2k) and there are the latency issues with VI's going that way, plus Mac PPC don't seem to be working that great with ProTools these days regardless. I have built a lot of customer PCs over the last 15 years and maybe it is time to move my system over to Windows XP. Am I crazy to be considering a PC at this time? If I am not crazy, what seems to be the best motherboard out there? Any that work well with 5 PCI-x slots so I can have a HD 5 system? What is the best rack chassis to purchase? What is the best Dual Video Card? Any comments in this area would be much appreciated. Is there anything I will miss when I move from Mac to PC?

Hi, I have been running an HD Accel 4 system on an old tried and trusted Asus P4C800E board with a 3.4 gig P4. Its getting a bit old now for native and VST stuff so I just bought an ASROCK ConRoe865PE board. It will take up to a Quad core Intel and has 5 pci slots.Other people seem to be having great success with these so far. Here is a link with some direct info. The problem on the PC side is finding a board that has any more than 2 or 3 slots these days. There are boards that have PCI x slots but they tend to be server boards with Xeon cpu's..and I'm not sure how they perform. As far as PC/Mac goes the win xp version of PT 7.3 is great. I have no problems at all with it. I came from a Mac setup and i couldn't be happier that i switched. There are so fewer O.S. upgrades with windows that i hardly ever need to upgrade any software and all is extremely stable. The things i miss from a mac are the Soundtoys plugins mainly..cant think of anything else. The bonus on Windows is being able to use Wavelab too.. Hope this gives you some insight! Best, Lifer

Hi, There's a sticky here that will help - I just built the Tyan "Quadzilla" K8WE system that's listed and it's working great so far. You can build one of these systems for less than the cost of an expansion chassis, and end up with a totally stable and super fast quad core machine. Since you build PCs anyway, this seems like a no-brainer to me. Pro Tools systems can be pretty picky about the hardware though, so you probably want to stay pretty close the the recommended specs.