the biggest influence on daw performance is actually the pci bus. a motherboard with all the bells and whistles can often be a pain when trying to assign IRQs and get the lowest latency for your soundcard. i use an asus mobo, but it took a lot of tweaking to get it right. next time around i'm planning to get one of the intel mobos that has a seperate pci bus for each slot. the word is they are rock solid.