As always, "it depends."
What kind of counter measurements do you intend to do? Occasional on-demand measurements or buffered measurements for transient analysis?
People's idea of cost-effective varies too. On the forums, it often means that someone can't spend $1000 on truly suitable hardware, but they *can* spend many extra weeks cobbling together a sub-optimal solution with inadequate hardware.
3 PCI-express X-series devices would be a very efficient hardware platform for all manner of buffered counter measurements since you get 4 DMA channels per card and you don't share bus bandwidth among cards.
A single X-series device would let you capture 12 pulses as hardware-clocked digital input signals that you can post-process for pulse analysis. You could even do neat things like capture based on change detection while using a counter to create timestamps from the change detection event pulse. In short, it's very likely you can capture all the necessary data but will need to do some software post-processing that's conceptually straightforward but fairly tricky to get completely and exactly correct.
-Kevin P
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