Sony Oxford is the top choice here if you want to boost anywhere near the top without it sounding nasty. The clipping thing I've not noticed but I'm an obsessive cutter of eq freqencies mostly maybe only boost by like 3db on anything normally and usually it'll only be a handful of tracks in a mix where i boost at all ... just doesn't come out as easy to mix if you boost stuff.

THe UAD compressors are remarkably good, I had a card for a week or two once and A/B'd it side by side with some real Urei's and whilst it's not quite as warm it has a lot of the same character, they are better than the bomb factory Urei emulations by a good margin in my book.

I remember the reverb in the UAD was good but I had trouble with the latency when I was using it (I had a shit early 24bit sound card, and the latency was so bad it was like having an annoying pre-delay on the verb all the time) and for some reason instead of upgrading the sound card I went completely mad and brought a protools rig instead and flogged the PC.

How much plugin capacity do you get on the powercore?