Just wondering what the initial impression of X3 is from people who have bought it and spent some time with it. I'll probably purchase within the next few weeks anyway, but I'm wondering: Does it run smoothly? Any crashes or BSOD? Any showstoppers?

So far, so good. Haven't had a chance to play around nearly as much as I'd like but it works well. Haven't run in to any stability issues or performance issues or anything like that. I love the new flyout EQ. It sounded like a gimmick to me when they talked about it but it is now my favourite EQ EVAR :D. It really is a slick, slick EQ. ARA works as advertised, and Melodyne is awesome (I've seen it in action but never owned it myself). Eastwest Play 4 doesn't seem to have any issues and it is known to be a bit prickly (don't get me started on Play :P). Interface is smooth and responsive. Haven't made it crash yet, which is not to say I won't, I'm pretty good at doing that.
 
All in all, I has a happy. Money well spent in my opinion.

Had two crashes already. I think there needs to be a patch addressing some Melodyne ARA issues (it is fantastic the way it is integrated, but there are some odd behaviors that can be showstoppers)

No problems here at the moment With Melodyne.. in fact no crashes at all.
Stable for me.

I keep finding more and more goodies that are great !! If you went out and bought the new plug-ins separately, I'll bet it would cost you at least  $1,000 bucks !!
 
There's a lot of new stuff here and it's all very high quality stuff too !!
 
It's running like a top for me !!

On my machine it seems to be VERY graphics intensive. But working well. I'm working on an X2 project and have found that in the Track view the fly out EQ stutters out slowly when used with an audio track of superior drummer. And the timeline slows down concurrently.

I need to investigate this more before contacting support, I had problems with graphics in X2. Especially when changing screensets.

Did you disable your floppy drive in Windows? That slowed down my screenset changing...
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/2160673

Yeah I looked at that sometime ago, I don't actually have a floppy drive setting in my Bios., that I can find. I'm sure there is something in my system setup. It should be more than powerful enough to run sonar but I do have graphics issues.

STinGA
On my machine it seems to be VERY graphics intensive. But working well. I'm working on an X2 project and have found that in the Track view the fly out EQ stutters out slowly when used with an audio track of superior drummer. And the timeline slows down concurrently.

I need to investigate this more before contacting support, I had problems with graphics in X2. Especially when changing screensets.

Please do contact us. We'd be more than happy to try and troubleshoot.

Thanks Andrew will do.