Does firewire have that much over PCI?

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onetrackmind7

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hi,
just wondering if you guys could help me figure out whether it's worth it to pay more for a firewire system, cheers
 
Within a several years PCI will not be probably used in PCs. Right now you can buy a new PC with PCI slots but I suppose that within 2 years people will have a problem to get motherboard with such slots. If you plan to use this equipment for more than 2 years think about firewire or usb.
Lifetime of electronic equipment is between 5-10 years.
Of course there is a problem with price - usb versions are more expensive than PCI versions and firewire versions are more expensive than usb versions.
Next you need to have better PC for usb and firewire since these equipments are more loading your cpu.
 
fova said:
Within a several years PCI will not be probably used in PCs. Right now you can buy a new PC with PCI slots but I suppose that within 2 years people will have a problem to get motherboard with such slots. If you plan to use this equipment for more than 2 years think about firewire or usb.
Lifetime of electronic equipment is between 5-10 years.
Of course there is a problem with price - usb versions are more expensive than PCI versions and firewire versions are more expensive than usb versions.
Next you need to have better PC for usb and firewire since these equipments are more loading your cpu.
Click to expand...

Why do you figure that there will be no more PCI ??? :confused:
 
my PC is
amd athlon 2500+
512 ram
and so forth,

i've been told that usb 1.1 is not worth it as it cant hold enough tracks at once, so if i was to get a firewire card, what are the good ones to look at, i have about $450, have they been experiencing problems do you know?
thanks
 
pci is going to go out the door soon.
The new standard being put in place is PCI express. A totally new interface.
Along with that will be the 64bit processors and windows 64bit version currently dubbed Longhorn.

That's only for PC based systems. Not sure about Mac.
 
To address the original question:

Firewire's only advantages over PCI, for desktop PCs, is modularity; that is, it provides the ability to hook up a number of external devices without having to buy PCI cards and open up your box and install them.

USB 2.0 provides the same advantage.

But neither Firewire nor USB will provide as much throughput as PCI. With digital audio, that is a real factor!
 
Oh yeah sorry, orig question. USB 2.0 has a thruput of like 450mb/s which beats out firewire actually.
The thruput of pci is def faster than that because it's built in. The real advantages to PCI are that when you get something like a protools HD system you have the PCI DSP to do all the work for the plugins leaving your CPU free to work with the tracks and managment of the data as opposed to being used to calculate reverb and stuff like that.
 
I use firewire (fw-1884) and I like it. No problems so far. I get 8 i/o, inserts on each channel, 4 midi i/o and a control surface for Cubase SX.

As for the PCI thingy, as far as I know the only PCI xpress cards available now are video cards. They are being developed as a replacement for AGP and they are supposed to be something like 8x faster than AGPx8. Asus makes a series of motherboards that start with "P5" that have one pci express slot instead of AGP and the rest are PCI slots.

I thought I also read in this article that PCI express will maintain software and hardware compatibility with PCI

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1087
 
While USB 2.0 boasts a transfer rate of 480Mbps as opposed to the 400 Mbps of FireWire 400, FireWire 400 will maintain a greater sustained transfer rate of large file sizes over USB 2.0.
 
As far as performance goes, PCI is still your best bet. Firewire and USB 2.0 each have advantages of their own, but raw performance isn't one of them. Also, PCI certainly isn't going anywhere too soon. 2 years ago people were saying the same thing.
 
xstatic said:
As far as performance goes, PCI is still your best bet. Firewire and USB 2.0 each have advantages of their own, but raw performance isn't one of them. Also, PCI certainly isn't going anywhere too soon. 2 years ago people were saying the same thing.
Click to expand...

I'd agree with this notion. For legacy sake, I'd hope there would be at least one PCI slot on future MB's for a bit yet. I still prefer using a PCI based audio interface as opposed to USB or Firewire - although Firewire isn't such a terrible option.
 
PCI dead? No way!

fova said:
Within a several years PCI will not be probably used in PCs./QUOTE]

Cr@pola!

PCI is a low-level, parallel data bus used by almost every peripheral in your PC. Firewire and USB themselves are often bridged to the PCI bus and they are both serial data transfer methods.

Have a look at this Intel white paper (320KB)
Click to expand...
 
wang191 said:
pci is going to go out the door soon.
The new standard being put in place is PCI express. A totally new interface.
Along with that will be the 64bit processors and windows 64bit version currently dubbed Longhorn.

That's only for PC based systems. Not sure about Mac.
Click to expand...

Wang,

Forgive me, but I think you heard a buzzword and jumped from an unfounded assumption to a foregone conclusion.

PCI Express is, from what I can find out, only on Intel mobos, and while there are non-video PCI express slots (which are, to me, surprisingly small) the only PCI Express cards I have seen are video cards which fit into a dedicated PCI Express video slot.

I don't think that you are going to see the demise of the PCI slot anytime in the near future. I just learned of another hot video technology by Nvidia that goes by the letters 'SLI'. Here is the (apparently) first incarnation of that technology.
 
wheelema said:
Wang,

Forgive me, but I think you heard a buzzword and jumped from an unfounded assumption to a foregone conclusion.

PCI Express is, from what I can find out, only on Intel mobos, and while there are non-video PCI express slots (which are, to me, surprisingly small) the only PCI Express cards I have seen are video cards which fit into a dedicated PCI Express video slot.

I don't think that you are going to see the demise of the PCI slot anytime in the near future. I just learned of another hot video technology by Nvidia that goes by the letters 'SLI'. Here is the (apparently) first incarnation of that technology.
Click to expand...


The SLI technology was used a couple years ago with voodoo2 video cards.
 
Well, I don't know, but methinks that they are recycling a TLA....
Nvidia certifies SLI partners, readies for launch

By Wolfgang Gruener, Senior Editor

November 10, 2004 - 10:57 EST

San Jose (CA) - Nvidia has begun to certify partners for its Scalable Link Interface technology (SLI) which allows users to run two graphic cards in a computer. The availability of SLI has not been announced yet, but systems and board manufacturers "are getting ready" to ship, according to Nvidia.
Click to expand...

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20041110_105755.html
 
well if public opinion and economic thinking have anything to do with this, the PCI slot will probably be around another 5 years. people are still running 98, 2000/nt on systems. i work at a newspaper and the news room didnt upgrade to xp pro until october. on top of that, the computer that updates internet files still runs on '95. the only reason i upgaded to xp at home was because i couldnt get the audiophile 24/96 to work on windows ME. I just now upgraded to the 64 3000 with the ddr400 memory. pc133 served me well in my 1.7 ghz celeron. its kinda hard for me to feel like i need to keep up with the Jones' when i hang out with the Smiths' everyday.
 
am i correct to say that I would need a seperate driver for a USB 2.0 device to work on my system? And that for XP, it MUST be obtained from whoever manufactured my computer?
 
ISA held on for quite some time after PCI became the de facto standard...

I don't see why PCI slots would disappear as soon as PCIe becomes mainstream...
 
shackrock said:
am i correct to say that I would need a seperate driver for a USB 2.0 device to work on my system? And that for XP, it MUST be obtained from whoever manufactured my computer?
Click to expand...
USB drivers are provided by the mobo manufactuer and are required to get USB devices to work... these drivers are not provided by WinXP.
 
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