Do you intend to be as obtuse,abrasive,sarcastic,and condescending as your reply implies Alex?

No we just have to agree to disagree, you believe that because other DAW's perform a certain way Sonar should as well. Nope sorry I disagree.
 
You say the essence of science is observation, and I disagree, the essence of science is knowing what to observe in the first place (that may require a lot of observation though, and judgement is knowing what to rule out).
 
That is a disagreement not a personal thing.
And it's hard to talk about performance when you won't show your full system specs. You don't seem interested in fixing this issue, rather just making a point for which I don't really see any groundwork.

I apologise if you feel like I'm being sarcastic or whatever, I'm just being straight to the point. I suggest moving on...

To Dan who sent me a PM I'm sorry I can't reply with a PM as I don't have the required number of posts to do so.Thank you for your informative and gracious message.

I have found X3 to use less CPU than X2. Also its more balanced with multi cores.  This is on Windows 8.1 64 bit. 

I agree with Alex here, don't want to rock the boat really, but he is right, its almost impossible to compare DAW's. I am sure that each setup needs its own specific tuning to work most efficiently and the devil is most certainly in the detail.  
With that said, i would say that sometimes, a particular setup just has issues with certain software/plugins and despite the best intentions, it just doesn't work the way we want it to.
I would like my last point to be that this forum is amazing, THE best forum i know of for genuine people trying to help without agenda. Don't give up just yet.
 
Having just seen Johns comment, i agree that the core balance is better in win 8 and better than X2. Just sorry i cant compare to reaper.
 
Kind regards
 
Bibs

Yup and I just want to apologise again if I came across rude, I was just frustrated in getting my points across..maybe a failing of mine.

Alex no problem it's often difficult to discern inflection from text I'm as guilty as anyone of presuming more than is intended from what people write on the internet (and us Celts are infamously touchy and quick to take offence). Thanks again for your time and help.

Well honestly if you need help we are all here, thanks.

my avatar is my performance

nebula is a cpu-hungry plug fo' sho'... how are you using the instances? if they're all on the same channel, that channel is all going to a single core i believe