i want more (iEEE1934) ports

MohammeD T wrote on 9/5/2005, 2:01 PM

Hi all

I want more Fire Wire ports on my PC , i only have one available at the moment , i cant figure out yet whats the Diffrence(technicaly) bitween having a Hub Vs Diasy chaining Vs New FW card with several ports , hope you can help , thanks

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farss wrote on 9/8/2005, 6:30 AM

The topshelf Decklink HD cards connect via PCI Express, to plug the same card into a G5 you need one monster interface card whereas on a PCI-E slot it's just a header card.

PCI E is going to be the way of the future (is that why Apple jumped ship?), there's some smart coders who've realised that all those parallel pipelines on the NVidia PCI-E graphics cards are great for...multitrack audio!

I don't know whose doing some dodgy maths here but I can tell you my WD IDE drives run one heck of a lot slower connected via 1394a than they do via direct IDE even for a single drive. 1394b should wind the wick up quite a bit. There's now quite a few drive boxes that are RAID 0 so 1394b would seem wise. Add two of those and two LaCie 1 TB boxes onto a system and you could be taxing the mobo's capacity no problemo.
Bob.

tvwonder wrote on 9/8/2005, 11:31 AM

***I doubt very much that you have 3 PCIe slots. PCIe is implemented right now for video cards and most machines only include one PCIe. The three slots you have are possibly PCIx.***

There are many motherboards available now that have three or more PCI Express slots. One is usually a PCI Express x16 slot, which is used for the video card and the others are a combination of x8, x4 and x1 slots. (The x numbers signify how many lanes or pathways the slot and cards in the slot have to access the chipset - the more lanes the more data can be transferred to/from the card plugged into it).

Currently there are very few cards available for anything other than the x16 slot (the video slot). Here is a card from SIIG that plugs into the PCI x1 slot and it uses the TI chipset http://www.cwol.com/firewire/siig-pcie-firewire-card.htm.

Everyone is waiting for sound cards, TV tuner cards, network cards, etc., but there has not been much released yet.

John_Cline wrote on 9/16/2005, 5:46 PM

Belkin has announced a Firewire 800/USB 2.0 PCI Express card. It will be shipping this month, if it hasn't shipped already. The model number is "F5U602"

John