firewire card recommendations?

[coadman]

I purchased a digital camcorder for my wife for christmas. I need to purchase a firewire card for my computer, as it currantly has no port for the cameras video. Any particular recommendations? In local stores, they can run upwards of $40-$50, but I see plenty on ebay for substantially less, so just looking for some advice from anyone in here.
thanks,
coadman

[hoxlund]

in this case i would "DO IT ON EEEEEE-BBBAAAYYY"

like the song says

[coadman]

in this case i would "DO IT ON EEEEEE-BBBAAAYYY"

like the song says

Any "brands" I should look for or stay away from? I saw a couple of unique items, where it has firewire port along with usb, plus has 3.5 front for installing in the computer. It might be handy to have the plug ins available on the front, as opposed to behind?http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=74940&item=6731234449&rd=1

coadman

[shaun]

Just make sure the firewire card you buy is OHCI (Open Host Controller Interface) compatible (you won't need a driver). Most are..but there are some snakey P.O.S. out there that use their own driver.

If you look around you can get some nifty video editing software included with some of the pkgs (ie. Pinnacle).

[coadman]

The price was fair, and it looked ok with the software.
thanks,
coadman

[ETP]

Be careful. Buy the cheapest simple card you can find with the fewest connections. I ordered two different styles from Newegg and the Super deluxe FW/USB one would not work because I ran out of system resources(lots of hardware on my machine), so I took it to work and installed it on a brain dead work computer where it works fine.

The $8-12 ones work perfect with my 3 Sony Cams. My 3 cheap FW cards in 3 different systems all different brands work fine.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... 003&depa=1

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... 015&depa=1

[texascbx]

81 bucks,Newegg Audigy 2 OEM with firewire port, been using my old Audigy Gamer firewire port for couple years now.

[Spazmogen]

I bought mine from E-bay last year. $36 US for an 8 port card:
4 ext USB
2 ext Firewire
1 int USB
1 int Firewire

It works like a charm.

Just make sure to get one with seperate chipsets for USB & Firewire (if you get a combo card). If you don't and you plug devices into both USB & Firewire at the same time, it will slow them down...

You can never have enough USB ports though.

Otherwise, you should be OK.

If I understand it right, Firewire800 is backwards compatible with the Firewire 400 speeds. Just FYI.

[hoxlund]

actually i don't thing thats correct, some reason i remember seeing firewire 800 or ieee1394b results on tom's hardware

he reviews external cases and showed that ieee1394b was not compatible with a speeds

let alone the connections are completly different

i know i have a nforce 3 ultra chipset with ieee1394b connections, they are completely different connectors

[dodecahedron]

I bought mine from E-bay last year. $36 US for an 8 port card:
4 ext USB
2 ext Firewire
1 int USB
1 int Firewire

what brand and model ?

[georgeg]

I purchased a digital camcorder for my wife for christmas. I need to purchase a firewire card for my computer, as it currantly has no port for the cameras video.

Does her camera record to tape or to a memory card of some sort? If it records to tape, you might just as well download the video via USB (which I assume her camera supports) as there will be no advantage to using Firewire. This is because tape storage digital video has to be played back during the download (at least on my wife's camera) and USB is plenty fast enough for that.

[BuddhaTB]

I'd stick with Adaptec for USB/Firewire upgrade cards.

[cfitz]

I purchased a digital camcorder for my wife for christmas. I need to purchase a firewire card for my computer, as it currantly has no port for the cameras video.

Does her camera record to tape or to a memory card of some sort? If it records to tape, you might just as well download the video via USB (which I assume her camera supports) as there will be no advantage to using Firewire. This is because tape storage digital video has to be played back during the download (at least on my wife's camera) and USB is plenty fast enough for that.

Actually, because the digital video has to be played back during the download, Firewire is the better solution. USB is more likely to drop frames than Firewire.

Some time ago Firewire cards with Texas Instruments chipsets (such as the older Adaptec models) were recommended as the best for video transfer because they were least likely of all to drop frames. I don't know if this is still the case.

I've had perfectly good service from an I/O Flex (Koutech) IO-PFW410 Firewire card you can buy at NewEgg.com for $15 shipped. It uses a VIA chipset. However, I have only used it for external drive interfaces, which puts less demand on the card than video transfers.

cfitz

[LoneWolf]

NewEgg has USB2/Firewire combo cards for $20-30. I just ordered one for my father-in-law for a b-day gift, it came out to $30 including shipping and the 1yr warranty (I wouldn't get the warranty for myself, but his birthday is a couple months away and all). The one I ordered has a 1.44 floppy power connector on it too, so you can be sure to provide bus power for any drives you connect. I mainly wanted it for USB 2.0 (he has an external Maxtor OneTouch drive that could use the speed boost), but the firewire may come in handy someday.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... 107&depa=0

It's not in stock, but ZoNetcards are also available for around that price.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... 004&depa=0

[Spazmogen]

I bought mine from E-bay last year. $36 US for an 8 port card:
4 ext USB
2 ext Firewire
1 int USB
1 int Firewire

what brand and model ?

Mine was completely Generic. It came in a sealed box, but there was no company name on it anywhere. The chips are NEC.

I google'd the NEC chips and found that Orange Micro was the probable maker. But everything was detected correctly in XP without the driver CD being required at all. So XP shows it as NEC.

[dodecahedron]

well, i ended up buying a combo card:
2xATA133 + RAID + FireWire (2 ext, 1 int) + USB (3 ext, 1 int)

http://www.siig.com/product.asp?pid=300



the FireWire chipset is VIA.
i hope it will be OK.

i got it because it was only $20 more expensive than the ATA133 card (no RAID, no FireWire or USB).
figured the additional $20 was worth it.

[bill]

well, i ended up buying a combo card:
2xATA133 + RAID + FireWire (2 ext, 1 int) + USB (3 ext, 1 int)

http://www.siig.com/product.asp?pid=300



the FireWire chipset is VIA.
i hope it will be OK.

i got it because it was only $20 more expensive than the ATA133 card (no RAID, no FireWire or USB).
figured the additional $20 was worth it.

Hi Dodec,

Nice find, the Siig card has a lot of features. When you get the card setup I'm curious how well it works with optical drives.

Thanks

[unclebud]

i just saw tis, was gonna say siig

[dodecahedron]

Nice find, the Siig card has a lot of features. When you get the card setup I'm curious how well it works with optical drives.

the reason i got the card was for the IDE really. i was thinking Siig since i've read some posts saying that Siig cards work rather well with optical drives (better than other brands).
all the FireWire and USB stuff...well i just browsed the Siig site and happened to see this product. for some reason it's much cheaper than similar ones like for instance a SATA+FireWire+USB combo card.
anyway it's $20 more than the simple IDE card (no FireWire, USB or RAID). i guess you can get a cheap FireWire+USB card for $10-$15, but with shipping it evens out.
and that uses up another PCI slot...

[bill]

Nice find, the Siig card has a lot of features. When you get the card setup I'm curious how well it works with optical drives.

the reason i got the card was for the IDE really. i was thinking Siig since i've read some posts saying that Siig cards work rather well with optical drives (better than other brands).

I understand, I've been trying to keep up with the IDE card discussions. For some reason my Lite-on 5238S tests fine using the mobo controller but not so well on the pci Promise card. I'm stumped as to why. Shaun mentioned model CN2487 but the card you mentioned would give me more options with future builds.

Hopefully you can give further confirmation that a Siig card (a specific model) might help me out so I can put the lite-on back in the case. Unfortunately, putting the lite-on on the mobo controller isn't an option for me at this time.

Thanks

[dodecahedron]

Hopefully you can give further confirmation that a Siig card (a specific model) might help me out so I can put the lite-on back in the case. Unfortunately, putting the lite-on on the mobo controller isn't an option for me at this time.

i'll try.
it will be a while till i get the card.
i hope it will work just as well as the simple PCI IDE card shaun mentioned.

but since i'm not very familiar with this stuff, help me out a bit here: what kind of problems should i be looking for when hooking up an optical drive to a PCI IDE card?

[bill]

Dodec,

I'll try to put the Lite-on back in the case this week so I can be more specific. But generally the buffer acted flaky, slow burns and or poor quality burns.

I'm getting off Coadman's original topic... sorry Coadman. I'll start another thread when I get set up.
Thanks