Supposedly, the legacy PCI support is native (not bridged) for x79, has any tried the Frontier Design Dakota/Montana cards in ASRock Extreme4 x79 motherboard? 

I'm hesitant to pull the trigger and order this MB and a 3930k until I hear someone else has tried this combination successfully. 

This will be an end-of-life buy for my old Frontier cards. If I can pull it off, I'll save about $1000 and can use the cards about another 6 years or so with any luck. 

Hi Eric,

No, not that specific Mobo, but I did use my Dakota/Montana combo in a couple different x79 based boards, and one of them was an ASRock. I don't have the details handy, but I'm almost certain it was an Extreme3.

Good luck, and please report back...

Hi Bill, 

Glad to hear that the x79 worked with both cards and that one of the MBs was an ASRock. 

Did the ASRock MB you used have the PCI slots that were not adjacent? If so, was the ribbon cable long enough? The ASRock Extreme4 x79 MB has a PCIE slot in between the two legacy PCI slots. 


Thanks for responding,


-Eric

UPS just delivered my new hardware! Time permitting, I'll pick away at a system build over the next few weeks, wish me luck! :-) 

Discovered the other day that there's no Win7 support for my Radikal SAC-2K control surface via USB because they stopped releasing new drivers, so I guess I'll have to experiment with its Mackie HUI emulation mode and run some MIDI cables to/from the new DAW. 

I'd spend time typing a DAW parts list, but I'm supposed to be working! Maybe later ... 


Back to the grindstone! 

So, here are the specs of the DAW I'm currently baking in my lab: 

• ASRock Extreme4 X79 Motherboard
• 32 GB of Ballistix BLT4K8G3D1608ET3LX0 (8GBx4) RAM
• Six Core Intel i7-3930K (Clocked up to 4 GHz) 
• Noctua NH-D14 SE2011 CPU Cooler
• NXTZ H2 Classic Silent Chassis
• Windows 7 Professional (64 Bit)
• Thermaltake TR2 RX 850W Power Supply
• Pioneer BDR-206DBK (Blu Ray Burner) 
• Two each XFX Radeon 6450 Graphics Adapters 
• 3WARE 9650SE-2LP HW RAID Adapter
• Two each 2TB 7200 RPM Barracuda Drives (for RAID mirror setup, Archived SONAR projects, and Video Editing)
• 480 GB OCZ Agility SSD (Windows Boot Drive)
• 120 GB OCZ Petrol SSD (SONAR Picture Cache & Temp) 
• 120 GB OCZ Petrol SSD (SONAR Working Files) 

Anyway, so far so good. It's still bare-bones at this point as I ran out of room on the 128 GB SSD and stopped installing software. I hadn't counted on the larger files sizes that 64 bit apps have and ran out of space. But, it's up and running in my lab at 4 GHz and it screams! I had it playing back two movies at 1080p on different monitors using YouTube in different browsers and it was only showing 5%-7% CPU usage. All I can say, is, "WOW!" My current Athlon 4400 X2 based DAW could not even play one of the movies at 1080p - it stuttered and showed both cores maxed out at 100%. So, this will be huge leap forwards. 

I won't know about the Frontier Dakota/Montana thumbs up/down until a few weeks go by. I'm not going to tear down my current working DAW until I have to. I should have the bigger 480GB SSD in hand this Thursday Afternoon, so I'll get to play a bit on the weekend and might load SONAR. 

Got the 480GB SSD and cloned to this newer disk, it booted right up! 

The 3Ware RAID card is up and running, even the email alerts setup worked. But it wasn't so simple ... I had to upgrade the card's firmware and then their installer had issues under Win 7 Pro x64, but I figured it out with a little help from Google and got their web interface running. It's going to take forever to low level format the 2 TB array.  I have next week off, so I will have time to play, play, play, play, play ... ;-) 

OMG, this thing is fast! I have been doing some video editing and it screams! It used to take about 8 hours to render and burn a DVD, now it's about 20 minutes. 

Can't move it into the studio or put in the Dakota/Montana until I keep a few promises to my wife - I need to do another "player minus one" album release to Amazon and i-Tunes. 

I just upgraded to Waves V9 from Waves v5.2 and and tried  to open a work in progress.90% of my plugs are Waves and they were not recognized due to the switch by Waves to VST from DX.  So, I'm going to have my work cut out for me when I cut over. 

I'm following your progress.

Having last week off gave me a good head-start, but things have slowed considerably now that I'm back at work. I'll make sure to post when I make progress, it may be a few weeks since we are now in the Holiday season, etc. 

Dave, I can't do the cut-over until XMAS break, too much going on ...