I will be helping a friend buy a new computer for his recording facility. He wants to be able to use FireWire equipment. I don’t know anything about FireWire that I haven’t just read at Wikipedia and CompUSA. The only accessories I saw for FireWire were cables and hubs. What is needed at the computer end? Is it a PCI card? An external controller? Is an expensive motherboard with pre-existing connections required? How is it connected? What kind of cash layout above and beyond the cost of the computer is he looking at? Thanks.
I’ve a PC motherboard with firewire built in. I bought a PCI firewire card for about $30 USD for another. A motherboard with firewire won’t cost much more than a regular board of the same type. My laptop had a built-in firewire port as well.
Think of Firewire as a solid USB. I use it for external hard drives, video transfers and in my music studio. Even though the specs of Firewire and USB2 are fairly close, firewire wipes the floor with USB2. I’ve had lots of transfer glitches with USB but I’ve never had one with firewire yet (and I use it alot).
Shop around for firewire cables. It is the one cable you can REALLY get ripped off on.
I should also add if he picked firewire as the transport for his audio interfaces,. he made the right choice.
If he hasn’t picked out an interface, have him check out the MOTU lines. They make a solid product.
If the computer doesn’t have a firewire card already installed, you’ll need to install one. There is also a cable that will connect the firewire port from the card to whatever piece of hardware you want to connect it to, just like USB ports use USB cables.
I personally have an external hard drive with a firewire connection, and I use firewire to connect my iPod as well, as opposed to USB. It’s much faster to transfer data/files than it is with regular USB.
I don’t think it’s incredibly expensive. I googled ‘install firewire card’ and there were some decent sites with instructions. I also tried ‘buy firewire card’ and there seemed to be ones ranging between 30-60$. I’m sure there are dopers with far more tech experience than me, but it’s not really rocket science. If you’re decently competent, you should be fine installing and setting it up.
No kidding, you can really get shafted on cables.
I got ripped off on a USB cable once, in a rural area with only one store to buy from. It cost me 30$ to buy one for my scanner/copier.
Luckily the external hard drive I purchased came with a firewire cable, so I didn’t have to purchase one. Oftentimes hardware will include a cable, so you can avoid some extra cost.
Firewire cards start around $15. All you need is a pci slot.
Thanks for the info. Here’s more on the situation.
We are planning to get him a barebones system. Is there a reason why we should not get an integrated motherboard rather than a non-integrated one? He won’t require gaming graphics capability, just the basic video functions that don’t necessitate buying a heavy duty video card. I see where these integrated MBs come with everything including surround sound. But he has a professional sound card and we would be bypassing any onboard sound card functions. I know you can do this in Device Manager. I have a non-integrated MB, because I already had video, sound and LAN cards from previous computers. My friend doesn’t have any other PCI cards handy, so would an integrated MB be fine for him?
The exact impact probably varies with the motherboard. One thing I can tell you, however, is that turning the built-in devices off in the Device Manager is generally NOT sufficient to achieve best effect (or sometimes any effect*). You should turn them off in the BIOS.
When I rebuilt my music computer, I went with an Asus A8N-SLI Premium. It has far more ability in video than I’ll ever need. I just got a basic, quiet video card for it. I also picked this board because it doesn’t have a fan. The less noise coming from this computer the better.
All the extra crap (like sound, printer port, one ethernet, floppy controller, serial ports, most the USB, etc) is shut off in BIOS. The operating system doesn’t even know the stuff is on the board.
When you set up the computer, go into the bios and find integrated devices. Go through all the things with him. Shut down all the stuff he won’t be using. You’ll also want to do this in Windows. If he’s not using a printer, shut down all services related to printing. Why run them and waste memory if they’ll never be used.