Let me preface by saying I'm DIY when it comes to PCs. I have a system that's bordering on 6 years old and have the $$ to upgrade. I want to go the i7 route (not planning to overclock) and am looking for advice on a good mainboard & RAM. It would have to have at least one PCI slot and of course a PCI Express slot, plus low DPCs for Win 7 64. I would migrate most of my peripherals over like my M Audio 2496, Edirol UA 101, my main drive which is an Intel SSD and my NVidia graphics card. Obviously I would reinstall the OS after the build was done. 

emwhy: 4 cores or 6 ?

Pretty much any of the better boards would work.  I have an i7 2600k, and I bought a board based on having a combination of USB 2.0 and 3.0 support, support for 32 GB of memory, and a decent layout, as far as USB connector and SATA connector placement for easy case access.

There are now some boards that support up to 64 GB of memory - take a look at those.  For my system, I went with 4 8 GB memory strips to give me the 32 GB.  Total cost for that much memory was around $209 at that time, but prices have come down quite a bit.   www.microcenter.com is a GREAT place for inexpensive but top of the line components, such as memory and motherboards (and all the other components too).  I believe you can get 16 GB of memory (2 x 8 GB) for $69 these days - I just checked their price on that a moment ago.  That would get you up and going with a good deal of memory, and you could add another 16 GB later, if you make sure the motherboard can support it.

Bob Bone

I have a I7 2600k and got a Z68 MA-B3 board for 59.00 at Microcenter. It works great and I have not had a reason to overclock. If I were going to do it again I might have chosen one of the very latest models with more usb ports, but I would have paid twice as much. 

  Been using the  ASUS P8Z68V GEN 3. It's been working pretty awesome. It has pretty much any port/slot you'll need for audio (although I think the legacy PCI slots are bridged which can cause issues if you have an old school PCI interface but the PCIE should be fine). It's reasonably priced. The one thing though is you absolutely MUST update the BIOS and a bunch of other crap right of the bat or it's gonna cause some problems.   

http://www.asus.com/Mothe...ocket_1155/P8Z68VGEN3/

Oh... I'm pretty sure that's my model but there are quite a few in that range so I'm not 100% sure without digging out the box... which I ain't gonna do but yeah... they're good.

aaaaand I should mention that although I did have some initial problems with my Layla 3G PCI interface at first after I optimized the system for audio it started working properly although I decided to just buy a newer USB interface. For other stuff less intensive PCI stuff though it should be fine.

The only other board I found close to it was an Intel which cost alot more. Gigabyte did have some similar offerings for less money but I was concerned about quality and I don't think it had as much port options. Cheers.

lol... I fogot to mention that I'm using an i7 2600k. 

I'll shut up now.

I was looking for 4 cores with hyper threading. Thanks for the tips on Microcenter, great prices, never heard of them before. So my next question is which is better Sandy or Ivy bridge?

I just got a new box from ADK. I'm not builder so I don't know what you're thinking about specs. But I'd have to say Ivy bridge is better from what I've seen. The 3770 Gigabyte i7 boards are really fast and will support 32 megs of mem in X64. Mine has 8 but I don't do huge projects. You're going to have to size for what you want to do basically, cause it all just got way bigger.