I’m planning to build a new DAW and have the budget for substantial hardware upgrades, as long as they translate into real (not theoretical) performance increases. This will be primarily used to run Ardour as well as multiple plugin instances, especially complex ones such as convolution reverb. I already have an 8-in, 8-out PCI audio card that affords pretty low latency without Xruns. For the new hardware, I’m looking at a Core i7-3820 processor in a motherboard that supports the LGA 2011 socket. I know that tasks such as video rendering benefit from multi-channel memory but what about audio work? If I use quad-channel memory architecture will the system benefit from the extra bandwidth or should I save my money and just go with dual-channel?