[PD] OT Reliability of PCI firewire adapters for audio

[Michael J Berkowski]

Greetings,

I apologize for cross posting a few different lists.  I've not found any
previous discussion about this in the archive.  Would anyone care to relate
experience/advice regarding the reliability of a PCI->firewire adapter for
multichannel audio (in win and linux)?  I realize the 828 does not have a
wide user base in the Linux community, but a few new firewire devices will
be available soon.  I'm being cautious because I've had a few motherboards
with poor PCI reliability in general.

I plan to build a new system soon, probably dual Athlon MP.  Can anyone
recommend a motherboard which actually has a built-in firewire port for
either the Intel or AMD architectures?
Is there a significant increase in latency, when bringing firewire into the
PCI bus compared with a built-in 1394 port?  Does it seem to slow the data
stream to disk?

Thanks much for your replies,

Michael Berkowski
berk0081 at tc.umn.edu