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The FireWire 800/400 card to own for 100% compatibility

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Well i sorta understand all the hesitation from musicians, as i'm one myself ;)
When I used the FW port on the U5DH i had 4 freezes in an hour time... not stable at all.

(while for some reason the same chipset under windows works like a charm!)

For some reason, everyone, even manufacturers (like MOTU), recommend TI chipsets.

I bought a 13$ FW card off of ebay which had a TI chipset on it and that works properly ever since...

But what's the advantage exactly of the one you're bringing to the table?


Finally I see a topic on people that discuss firewire. I also have a U5DH and have trouble with (firewire audio) from day one.
Indeed it has a cheap VIA chip for firewire. Had many freezes on Windows 7. Reinstall on other HDD did not work.
On OSX youtube is very slow, sometimes does not load. VLC plays video with audio but always generate an error and XBMC does not even play sound.
Other things are working great though. I mailed Gigabyte support multiple times but they could not really help me.

So here I am. I will also search for a good TI based PCI/PCIe board. Kind of hard to find in The Netherlands though.. But I will get there eventually.

I posed this thread today, but now I see this im kind of glad to see that my expectations where right about the Z77 line of gigabyte because of the VIA chip.

Link : http://www.tonymacx86.com/desktop-compatibility/70665-ga-z77x-ud5h-1394-via-chipset.html#post438377

I use an M-Audio ProFire 610. Windows just freeze random.. and OSX struggles to play audio/video/flash. Since the problems occur on both Operating Systems it must me hardware. There is no official M-Audio driver for Linux so I could not check. If I turn off the Audiocard the system is very stable.. buy hey!! I need my sound. That's one of the reasons I bought this board for Firewire.. to bad though.. Searching for a decent PCI/PCIe TI based firewire card now.. Thanks for this thread!
 
Did you actually read the first post of this thread?
TI cards aren't guaranteed to work, hence why I recommended a card with the LSI/Agere FW643 chip, as it's identical to what Apple is using in its products. It's also the only native PCI Express FireWire chip out there, all the TI solutions rely on either an external or internal PCI to PCI Express bridge which can at least in theory add latency.
 
Thanks, Swede, for pointing out this native OOB 1394A/B board/chipset.

I was able to find an EBay auction for the Sunix FWB3414G (for the internal header) out of Australia, haven't been able to find them here in North America. I'll report back with any successes/failures.

The priority for my rig is 100% stability and as much native compatibility as possible. Sometimes, it these little things that count. For USB 3.0, I think I'll have to change motherboards once the ML+UEFI dust settles.
 
Hi all,

I've just put the StarTech PEX1394B3 in my GA-Z77-UD5H / i7-3770K running ML 10.8.1.

My connected device doesn't appear and the System Information shows "Unknown Device" (see attached).

I was expecting my Hack to natively recognise it. What did I miss?
 

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Turns out, the card does work. I had to power-cycle my device before it started using the FW800 port, apparently.

Which BIOS version will have the fixes for sleep/shutdown? Anyone know? Are they in f14?
 
Are there any alternatives. Would prefer one with FW 800 capabilities.
I bought a crappy syba card, and it works....barely, cant record 48 khz and above.

The startech cards look good but they are expensive.
 
Just to be clear, the StarTech cards have 2x1394A and 1x1394B ports (400 and 800)
 
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