Firewire PC card

I just purchased a d-link firewire card to go with my apple iPod. I had another card before but it was unpowered, and I had to tell the iPod it was connected.
The first card worked fine as far as the software was concerned, my iPod was recognized as a hard drive through xPlay and all was well.
With the d-link XP's device manager gives me a "device cannot start(code 10)" for my iPod, which acording to Microsoft means that the driver is bad.

Others have had this problem with the d-link.
Does anyone either have a sugestion to make this work? or a sugestion for a "good" powered firewire card.

You might want to look for a firewire card that has a power connector of some type, since the iPod is going to be charging off that connection. Unfortunatly I haven't looked around for one (no need for a firewire port yet), so the only one I know of that has an internal power cable plug is on it is the Radeon All In Wonder 8500. It costs quite a but, but comes with a decent 3d Video card and TV tuner

How does the Radeon All in Wonder 8500 compare to an Elsa Gladiac GTS 64DDR? How much faster is the radeon? What is the current state of the art in drivers, e.g. is the hardware being pushed as hard as it could be? Does it have a firewire port? Does it have dual monitor? I currently have a Elsa GTS 64 and a PCI Voodoo5 board driving separate monitors.

Just curious--haven't been keeping up.

Calvin

The Radeon 8500 is comparable to a Geforce 3 Ti 200 for speed. The All in Wonder 8500 runs something on the card slightly slower, but not enough to notice much. Right now ATI's drivers aren't the best that they could be, but they are improving quite a bit. The hardware will probably see some speed boosts from future drivers.

The normal 8500 does support dual monitors, but dosen't come with a firewire port. The AIW 8500 dosen't support dual monitors, but dues support dual displays when using a TV. It also comes with a TV tuner, the firewire ports on the card and breakout box, and an RF remote. I use the generation below it in my TV system (PC hooked to a 27 inch Gateway Destination monitor) and I get awesome results for DVD playback and TV watching. As I said in the laptop thread, ATI may not always have the fastest 3d, but they more then make up for it in general quality elsewhere.

Oh, and the 8500 is the only card that supports Truform. It's a technology new and recent games are supporting that helps smooth out models jagged edges, with no peformance hit. Some screenshots of this can be seen here

/me jumps off his graphics soapbox

I ended up getting a recommendation for the Belkin 3port firewire card. It must be popular as it's out of stock everywhere you go.

I guess 3rd time's a charm. Right?

The normal 8500 does support dual monitors

Does it have proper RAMDACs on both channels? I hate the way that the Matrox dual-head cards have "1920x1440" plastered all over them, and in the teensiest of tiny little print say "On primary head only". The primary RAMDAC is 360MHz and the secondary is basically TV resolution.

Peter

Amen! My Milennium G400 is that way. How damn expensive could it be to support high resolution on the 2nd monitor? I ended up dropping a Matrox MYSTIQUE (must be a 5 year old card) into it for the 2nd monitor, and using the DualHead output for my TV so I can watch DVD's. Not ideal, but it works.

The G450 solved that problem. It had separate Ramdac's for for the video outputs (and so did the G550). of course 3D wise that card wasn't even remotely playing in the same league as the Gforce cards. But for 2D there's still nothing that beats a Matrox card.

The G450 solved that problem. It had separate Ramdac's for for the video outputs (and so did the G550).

According to Matrox's web site, both the G450 and G550 still only have 230MHz RAMDACs on the secondary head.

Peter

None of the dual head offerings fit my needs. I wanted 3D acceleration and high resolution on both monitors, so I ended up going with two separate cards. The fastest PCI 3D card is the Voodoo5 which can be obtained cheaply. Sadly it doesn't keep up wih the latest AGP cards.

Calvin

"Separate Ramdac's"... Yeah so does my G400 but the secondary one is a lot slower, therefore it can't handle higher resolutions. I didn't think this problem was fixed in the newer offerings.

I can't find anything on ATI's site to say yes or no on the RAMDAC issue. Maybe hybrid8 can chime in here if he knows.

Unfortunately I can't give you the nitty gritty in numbers cuz I don't have any of my docs on me. I should commit all this to memory, but when you're lookign at as many products and chipsets as me, things start to get fuzzy. Not to mention things can be configured in any number of ways depending on the OEM and their own agendas.

The 8500 can definitely do fairly high resolution on both displays. The primary can go higher though. You more than likely cannot do 2 x 2048 for instance. But you should be able to do 2048 on one desktop and 1600 on the other.

It supports mutlipe analog displays, but only 1 panel - the chip that is. If you want a card to support 2 panels you have to add another tmds controller to the board (not a big deal - again, up to an OEM or market research).

I'll see if I can update this thread while I'm at Macworld this week. Otherwise feel free to ask for all the technical bits for when I get back to work on the14th.

Bruno

Life is beautiful when you're looking at a display of 3840x2400-something and with the most vibrant colour you've ever seen.

According to Matrox's web site, both the G450 and G550 still only have 230MHz RAMDACs on the secondary head.

Woops! You're right! The main difference between the G400 and the G450 was that the secondary Ramdac was now also integerated, but it was still slower than the first Ramdac.

I must have it confused with some other card, though I can't think of any card of which the two video outputs are powered by an equally powerful ramdac. It's either that or I really must stop sniffing glue.

Anyway, I stopped buying matrox cards with my G400Max. I still got the card, in fact it's the one I'm using right now. A great card in every aspect, but somewhat lacking now in the 3D area (what do you expect from a card that's 2.5 years old), but I still think it's the best card Matrox has procuced to date.
It's really sad to see what has become of a company that was once regarded as the producer of some of the best video cards in the world...

In case anyone still cares, the DACs in the 8500 are in fact two different speeds. The secondary display connector is tied to the TMDS and it's primary purpose would be to drive an LCD.

That said, I had two CRT displays running 2048x1152 without a problem this week on a Mac. That's a wide-screen mode. Non-wide you'd be able to still do 2048x1536 on the primary (VGA) and 1920x1080 on the secondary (DVI-I) connector. At higher resolutions, due to the slower DAC (I don't want to post the frequency now because I can't remember exactly what it is), you obviously won't be able to run at the highest refresh rates. Actually, I could do 2300x1294 on the primary with that monitor (SONY FW900).

Oh... This card will also drive IBM's new 3840x2400 panel (it only supports 15Hz when being driven by the single card). This is one hell of an amazing display. Only $18-24000 USD.

And in relation to the post that started this thread... ATI also has a very affordable (read: VERY cheaply priced) 3-port firewire card. It's 6-pin - so it is powered. Whether or not it has enough power for a specific device I can't say. I haven't tested it with an iPod. Though the card works perfectly fine in a Windows box as well as a Mac (you need to have Firewire extensions which are included with all new versions of the OS).

I meant to do this followup a few weeks ago and forgot... Sorry. Just noticed I still had the thread marked as a fav.

Bruno