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47290
August 24th, 2014 16:00
Firewire card support on Inspiron 660
I bought an Inspiron 660 desktop with Win 8 (home version, I think) a year or so ago. Subsequently wishing to use USB Audio peripherals (Edirol UA-25 sampler, headphone DAC etc.) which aren't supported by basic Win 8, the cheapest workaround was to downgrade to a new version of Win 7 (I got a Dell version) complete with a new HDD in the desktop. This arrangement works just fine with all my USB audio peripherals.
Next I wanted to run an M-Audio Firewire 4-channel audio interface box and installed a PCI express Firewire card got from eBay. This is 1394A, unbranded with WB381 chip. It shows up in device manager - no reported problems. However the Sounds menu in Control Panel doesn't see it as an available playback or recording device, and the M-Audio box is also reporting no connection. i have tried all three available drivers in Win 7 for the card, as suggested elsewhere, with no success. The M-audio box does work OK with Win XP on a different computer with an OEM-supplied Firewire port but I haven't any other PC's with PCI express slots to test the card..
Is this likely to be a Dell software issue or a PCI hardware/driver problem. Maybe I should get a card with a different chipset. I note there are a lot of posts relating to issues with Firewire and Dell computers. Are there any tests I can run to establish what is going on.
thanks in advance
John
speedstep
11 Legend
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47K Posts
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August 25th, 2014 12:00
Windows 8 and 8.1 firewire drivers are flaky.
The only way to fix this is to use a card with Texas Instruments Chipset and copy the LEGACY drivers from a windows 7 machine.
Below are the ones with Texas Instruments chips
MASSCOOL 3-Port Firewire 1394a 6-Pin PCI Express Card Model PCE-F201 Newegg Link Manufacturer Link Chipset: TI XIO2200A
SIIG Two-port FireWire 400 PCI Express x1 card Model NN-E20112-S2 Newegg Link Manufacturer Link Chipset: Texas Instruments
SYBA PCI-Express 1394 FireWire Card Model SD-PEX-FWB Newegg Link Manufacturer Link Chipset: TI TSB82AA2
Grunger
8 Posts
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September 1st, 2014 01:00
Thanks for the advice. I did finally got the original generic 3-port Firewire card to talk to the M-Audio 410 by reinstalling the M-audio software interface. Maybe I'd put the wrong S/W version in first time. Audio transfer is OK, but on putting the Dell into sleep mode, it now hangs on wake up, necessitating a reboot, and generating a Win 7 file integrity check. So hot plugging the Firewire card is not possible, though it is running on my old XP deskktop.
It's not clear whether a TI chipset would work better than this.