I wanted to do a check from fellow users to see what of these hardware improvements you've made after the release of X2a which produced for you the greatest performance increase for Sonar. This includes the ability to increase tracks and/or experience general responsiveness as well as the ability to reduce latency or minimize drop-outs.
 
1) Additional CPU Cores
2) Faster Motherboard
3) More/Faster RAM
4) SSD drive
5) Separate working disk/H.D.
6) Faster Video Card
 
Additionally, even though this was not part of my question, but useful: Using vs. not using Anti-Virus software, de-fragmenting your hard drives, etc.
 

If you have a late-model PC of any sort (say, Core i7), any gains made through the expenditure of upgrading any of the components listed above will be marginal at best (if you notice any improvement at all) with the exception of the SSD; your computer should boot faster and files should load faster, but arguably you won't be storing sampler libraries on it due to size, so you'll just have a faster boot to Windows and faster program launching.
 
Defragmenting is handled automatically by newer O/S's.
 
KEv

I built the new rig to handle whatever I can throw at it for the next 5 years or so (hopefully). The old one would probably turn into a puddle of fizzing goo if I tried install X2 on it as is but I'm tempted to see if I could get X1 running on it. It's an XP rig and probably just scraping the bottom end of min requirements.

Sound car drivers play a bigger role than anything else,. if you have a recent PC. if your using an older Pc ,then adding more ram or updating a video card will do you no good
 
Cj

Yeah, if you are a little above recommended specs and have a good interface and configured your system well all should be good. We've got guys on here doing crazy stuff on rigs that don't even meet the MINIMUM specs. If you have the cash to upgrade your system it's probably better spent toward buying parts for a new build for the future.

How about adding a PCI or PCIe firewire card to the list? Even though I have a great and stable motherboard, I am going to go that route, since it isn't too expensive, in an effort to HOPEFULLY clear up some of my constant crashes.

If you have a firewire interface then yeah that's a great idea. Be sure the card has one of the good chipsets on it like the Texas Instruments FW chipsets. It's worth scouring the net to check the makes of both the card and the TI chipset and/or contacting Focusrite to see which ones they recommend.
 
Oh and don't use legacy PCI if you have a PCIe slot available. Cheers.

Beepster
If you have a firewire interface then yeah that's a great idea. Be sure the card has one of the good chipsets on it like the Texas Instruments FW chipsets. It's worth scouring the net to check the makes of both the card and the TI chipset and/or contacting Focusrite to see which ones they recommend.
 
Oh and don't use legacy PCI if you have a PCIe slot available. Cheers.

Believe me, I am looking into it from all angles.  Found a couple boards on eBay for a good, cheap price so even if they don't work to cure my ailments, then no big $$$ lost. And I have asked the sellers to report back the chipset manufacturer and part number. I am specifically looking for TI.
 
Would there be a problem to use PCI instead of PCIe? I have a spare PCIe slot, but the card will block the cooling fans of my graphics card.

PCIe is supposedly much faster but the main problem with legacy PCI on newer motherboards is that the manufacturers now use a "bridged" connection as opposed to a "native" connection. This isn't generally a problem for most old cards people want to use but because of the high demands of audio it can choke the data and cause poor performance which can result in dropouts and crashes. I am not familiar with your MOBO but I have an ASUS as well and ran into this problem with my old Echo Layla card. If your case is sufficiently cooled then I'd say the better connection for your audio card trumps any slight temp increase. Just keep an eye on your system temps and if things start getting overheated add some case fans or even just leave one of the case panels off. I mean check out the temps now and google what is appropriate. If it's pushing the limits as it is then yeah... might be a concern but if the case is good I doubt it'll be a problem. Cheers.

Oh and unless you are using it as a gaming system as well I doubt your vid card is going to get too hot anyway. I'm not too knowledgeable about those wacky high end cards though. I just have a $20 Gigabyte card with a gig of RAM. One little fan on the card and it works fine without any heat issues.