Hello,

I think the last 7 years I've been a satisfied customer of RME. I have the hdsp9652 and it has survived 3 workstation moves, a multitude of flashes and a year of dust collecting inbetween and still working perfectly.

But now as this milestone of 64bit and PCIe and multicore cpu has come, and I find myself unable to render current projects that I'm doing, I want to move to 64bits and also upgrade to a new soundcard. Now I am using 23 vsti's 10 fx and a multiude of other audio tracks and I find that the project doesn't even want to render propperly anymore, not even at high latencies: because theres a few plugs that don't like those latencies for their sync.

Anyway: time to move over.

The HDSP had this massive amount of ADAT connectors that I didn't really need. The AIO would be just perfect in a sense that I would also have headphones, rca stereo in/out, and only an ADAT io for my behringer AD/DA.

I produce mainly with one pc + one virus TI snow. So basicly the rest is all plugins like EWQL play, nexus, fx plugs controlled by a keystation 88pro by M-audio.

Does all this software usage benifit from upgrading to pci-e? Or would that only be when I am recording alot of tracks from the AIO inputs ?

I guess most benifit will be the i7 processor that I'm buying. I just hope that I can safely track and sequence at at least 3ms latency.

Does that pci slot needs to be in that small pci 1x slot on the mobo or can you also put it inside the x16 slots ? Would that have an impact on performance ?

Also, on sites like thomann.de i see it listed for 525?, others have it for $720 and i've seen it as low as ?399. What is the list price I can expect ?