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I just took delivery of a 4 port PCI firewire card, when i took it out of the box and looked at it i saw a 4-pin female power connector on the PCB, i thought this was a little odd since i have only ever seen this type of thing on graphics cards. Why is it on there and would i need to use it in order for the card to work? There arn't any instructions with the card to tell me such information and the card is not listed on the manufacturers website.
If the 4 pins are on the card like on the 1 here http://www.scan.co.uk/images/products/2324.jpg
then its an internal Fire-wire connection and NOT a power connection :)
Hope this helps :)
Its the same as what your describing but it has the added molex connector:
http://www.applepics.com/50/userfiles/41b71fc40272f.jpg
Devices that draw their power off the firewire port may need it. However I dont' have any firewire device that do that... so I've never had an issue with my molex-less card.
So really then its only there if devices are pulling more juice than the PCI bus can supply?
I reckon so.
Rich :¬)
Yeah that's my theory... well that's all it can be.
I didnt realise that firewire could provided enough juice over the standard connections to need an extra molex !
Then again, ive never really used firewire.
This is what i thought. I got a 5 port USB2 card and that doesnt have any such connector and USB2 is faster than Firewire 1. Maybe its because firewire can supply more power, iirc you can link firewire devices together aswell, so yeh you probably would need extra power. Any way thanks for your replies everyone:)
Actually that reminds me.
You can now pump 2A down USB rather than the usual 0.5A:
http://www.everythingusb.com/news/index/5777.htm