Firewire and latency

[Jan]

Does anybody know if there is a difference in latency between a firewire connection standard on a motherboard, and a PCI card providing firewire connections for the computer?
In other words, if you hook up a midi controller/ audio interface to a firewire port on a PCI card in your computer, could it have a bigger latency than when it is connected to a firewire port on the motherboard?

[Scott Cairns]

Hi Jan, I have an onboard firewire card. Many people I have spoken to claim that pci cards in general (including the pci controller cards to plug in more hard drives) give better performance than a device that is built into the motherboard.

I certainly dont think that the throughput of a pci card is any worse. Bear in mind that in a lot of cases onboard controllers are quite often built by a third party anyway that the motherboard manufacturer has to then integrate into the board itself.

I certainly havent noticed any delays or problems with my firewire card.

Regards, Scott.

[Jan]

Thanks for the feedback, Scott. I feared that perhaps a slight latency might occur from using a firewire card to get a firewire connection to the computer. If the latency is in terms of nanoseconds no one will notice it, but when it gets into the millisec area it’s a problem.