PCI Firewire vs onboard Firewire

[msb1]

Hello,

 

I'm building a PC to be used solely as a music server. I have an option of using 2 motherboards, one with onboard firwire and one without. Since the one with firewire costs 2x the price, is there any difference (in sound output) in using a PCI firwire card with the one without firewire?

 

Thanks.

 

[aljordan]

I can only speak from my own experience here, but I've never had any trouble with on-board firewire controllers on three different computers. I did have trouble with a Texas Instruments based PCI firewire card when recording and playing back files at the highest resolution that my DAC supports. Its possible that there was too much stuff on the PCI bus, or some sort of conflict, although I couldn't find a conflict at the time.

 

Alan