I recently upgraded to a windows 8 laptop with an i7 processor. I was a little reluctant - having heard horror stories all around about sonar, my audio interface and my controllers.
The good news:
Sonar X2 is working flawlessly. I've only had one whitescreen in the last 3 weeks. I have an m-audio fast track ultra, and that was my main concern, as they do not have a win 8 qualified driver yet. (what good is a new computer if an audio interface is not compatible, right?) No problems there either.... It works on the usb 2 bus, on the usb 3 buses, and on a bus-powered usb 2 hub plugged into the usb 2 ports and usb 3 ports.
I've been doing a lot of testing, notably a project with 65 audio tracks and all pro channel modules enabled and multiple fxchains loaded into the pcs. I've been setting up pure data to run significant amounts of midi data into sonar using about 8 instances each of massive, kontakt, dimension, rapture and sound center and pentagon I. Pentagon I with (esp the nothing patch) works with all the valley simulators, though I'm still showing 99+db spikes in the system which i take care of by having a pentagon track template with boost11 limiter loaded into an fx bin.
I really can't say enough. I'm about halfway through installing all my vsts and getting my system where it was, so I'll post more as I go along.
I think with all the horror stories in the forum early on (and most people post when there are problems, right???) I thought I'd post some good news. I'm a pretty happy camper and am looking forward to more musical armageddon to come! If you're thinking about upgrading your system I can say there are probably more good stories out there than bad, but the bad is all we usually see.
Cheers everybody!
+1 CW