Interesting article about firewire controller chipsets

Haha, thanks dude! Completely forgot I posted this, I had three hellacious finals yesterday, and by this point I was heavy into my substance-aided destressing :lol: But yeah, definitely sticking with TI chipsets in the future!
 
yep, had to buy a separate pci firewire card with the TI chip too, the onboard controller on my ASUS motherboard would work with the profire. I think that was a VIA firewire chip.
 
On Mac OS X, I've found that if you use anything other than a PCI Firewire card with a TI chipset, that no audio interface I've ever tried works properly. Windows will let you play around a bit longer before things go wrong, but ultimately it's not something I would consider "optional."
 
I tried using a FireWire adapter connected to a PCI slot once. The audio turned out be super fucked up - garbled, distorted, *add another word here*. But the article claims that all built-in FireWire ports are based on south-bridge (lots of traffic), while using an adapter connected to the PCI (northbridge) can perform better.

I changed motherboard later on with one that had the firewire port built-in, and my n00bness made me figure out that it was the PCI slot that was the culprit *Ahh, PCI has less bandwidth than FireWire*. Looks like I was wrong - It was all due to the shitty FireWire adapter, and not the PCI slot. A firewire adapter wouldn't give you a PCI bandwidth just cause it's connected there. I don't have any problems with my built-in one whatsoever, but I guess I should move on with an adapter instead. Just for the sake of it.

Thanks for the article, Marcus. This really opened up my eyes.
 
My laptop has a built in FW port with a Ricoh chipset, and it worked great with my Firepods. When I switched to the Profire, however, it would not even be recognized when plugged into the onboard port. Thankfully I had purchased a nice, cheap TI chipset expresscard a few weeks before. It works great with the Profire and no problems.

If anyone is looking for a nice but inexpensive TI chipset expresscard, outletpc.com has Syba FW expresscards for around 35 shipped.
 
I have a syba PCIe card TI chipset that didn't work with my Profire. It took a lot of effort to get it working including loading Vista firewire drivers. Never fully working though.
The SIIG card (recommended by digi/M-Audio) I bought later worked right out of the box. There are some weird things that pop up from time to time, but it's most likely PT 8 bugs. :mad:

But DEFINITELY get the TI cards, can't go wrong with a SIIG. The amount of time and effort and $ wasted trying to get cheaper cards to work doesn't make it worth it. GET THE RECOMMENDED MODEL.
If you need tech support, they won't talk to you until you get one anyway!
 
Hey Nate! Did your Firepod work stable, without any dropouts during recording or playing audio? I just bought a Firepod (beeing shipped right now) and I have a Dell XPS m1530 with the RICOH chipset. Tried it with Alesis Multimix Firewire mixer but I was recieving some dropouts, so I wonder how will it work with the FP... What's your laptop?
 
AudioGeekZine said:
I have a syba PCIe card TI chipset that didn't work with my Profire. It took a lot of effort to get it working including loading Vista firewire drivers. Never fully working though.
The SIIG card (recommended by digi/M-Audio) I bought later worked right out of the box. There are some weird things that pop up from time to time, but it's most likely PT 8 bugs. :mad:

But DEFINITELY get the TI cards, can't go wrong with a SIIG. The amount of time and effort and $ wasted trying to get cheaper cards to work doesn't make it worth it. GET THE RECOMMENDED MODEL.
If you need tech support, they won't talk to you until you get one anyway!
Click to expand...

Interesting. My Syba has been flawless. I can't justify spending the extra money (now) for a Siig or similar when the Syba has proven to be reliable for me. I have 0 complaints, and I run Vista.

I use Nuendo 3, so YMMV?
 
utarefson said:
Hey Nate! Did your Firepod work stable, without any dropouts during recording or playing audio? I just bought a Firepod (beeing shipped right now) and I have a Dell XPS m1530 with the RICOH chipset. Tried it with Alesis Multimix Firewire mixer but I was recieving some dropouts, so I wonder how will it work with the FP... What's your laptop?
Click to expand...


I have an HP dv9235nr. The firepod (and FP10 I ran with it) always worked well with the Ricoh chipset. I bought Syba card purely as a "test" to see if it would work better than the Ricoh integrated due to how much crap I had read online about them. IMO, I noticed no difference in anything between the Ricoh and the Syba with my Firepods.

That said, I've not heard many good things about Dells in general when it comes to audio, especially laptops. I'm interested to hear how it works out for you. I'd imagine that getting an expresscard would be the way to go if any problems do come up.

One thing I did do, too, to safeguard everything is to make sure the the IRQ's for my FW ports (or card) are not sharing with anything. When I checked it on my computer, the IRQ for the Expresscard port is 17, which is shared by nothing else.
 
Thanks bro! I ordered a Manhattan expresscard FW with Texas Instruments chipset anyway already yesterday. The Firepod should be here in three days, I'll let you know hows things. Would be cool if it would work at least with one of them :) This Dell worked for me just fine for audio shit, until I desired to get a Firewire interface... Damn it's such a nice machine, shame it doesn't like itself with FW stuff :(
 
Ok, so on the built-in Ricoh controller it doesn't see the Firepod at all. Red light is burnin and there's nothing to do with it. But happily everything is looking to work stable on the expresscard TI chipset FW controller. Writing this in case if someone has similar problems :)
 
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