Well I have been steadily beefing up my PT LE DAW over the last year or so and I have pretty good set up. I recently purchased a Wave APA44 and I am running UAD cards as well. I am currently run everything off of a Carillon P4 3.2GHZ w/ 1GB of RAM

Despite all of this external DSP power I still ocasionally run into 'issues' when recording with plugs. I record primarily acoustic music so it is not completely unusual for me to record 18 tracks at a time. I record a 24/48 so it is not like I am using insanely high sample rates.

I have to adjust my hardware buffer size to about 256 which is livable but barely so when tracking. I couldn't figure out why I was having issues and than it dawned on me, I have 2 UAD bards and an added Ethernet adaptor filling up my PCI slots.

It occurred to me that I may dealing with bandwidth limitations in my PCI bus. I haven't been keeping up to date on all the CPU and motherboard trends for PC but who has the beefiest PCI bandwidth? I would love to hear some suggestions, thanks.