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I'm ready to purchase a PCI-E firewire 400 card to get my Saffire Pro sound card off the macs built in firewire bus. Are there any cards I should stay clear of? I have a UAD-1 card on the way but that shouldn't effect things with the PCI-E architecture, right?
All opinions welcome.

I was told that on pci-e systems no 2 cards share a bus, or that each card gets its own path to the processor. So hopefully card confilcts are a thing of the past.

I have not aquired "geek" status so my understanding of system archetectuere could be flawed....

ponytrack wrote:I'm ready to purchase a PCI-E firewire 400 card to get my Saffire Pro sound card off the macs built in firewire bus. Are there any cards I should stay clear of? I have a UAD-1 card on the way but that shouldn't effect things with the PCI-E architecture, right?
All opinions welcome.

Why do you need a PCI-E firewire card ?
Do you use anything else than the Saffire Pro on your internal firewire ?
Aramis

Aramis wrote: Why do you need a PCI-E firewire card ?
Do you use anything else than the Saffire Pro on your internal firewire ?
Aramis

Well, to tell you the truth, I'm bothered by the way the Audio Performance meter moves excitedly between 5% & 25% even when there's only one track open and no pugs! A friend told me not to worry about the meter as he thinks it's probably not accurate, but I could certainly use more convincing.
I have my studio settings set to only 4 stereo buses, prime secs @ 2.50, quantas @ 100 and work percent 92. Now maybe this is a glitch with Focusrites new model, but I seem to recall a lot of peoples issues being resolved by going the PCI firewire route.

I trashed prefs. What else could it be?

Don't use DP's Performance Monitor.. use the Activity Monitor Apple Utility, found in APPLICATIONS>UTILITIES, to get a much clearer picture of CPU usage. It shows a meter for each of your four processor cores independantly, so you can tell when things are getting wonky and restart if necessary.

I concur with Aramis: Unless you are running external Firewire drives for your audio, VIs, or something that causes conflicts on the bus, you should be fine with the built-in Firewire (unless the Saffire software is unstable.) My system is very solid with the MOTU 828mkII on the internal Firewire bus. Although I have a few Firewire drives, they are for backup only, and are always powered down while I work within DP. I added a Hi Point card to allow me to run up to four eSATA drives; I currently have two Raptors for my VIs in an external case, with plans to add more if the need arises.

On the other hand, if there is a conflict between Saffire and the internal Firewire, a PCIe Firewire card could end your troubles. Good luck!

ponytrack wrote:

Aramis wrote: Why do you need a PCI-E firewire card ?
Do you use anything else than the Saffire Pro on your internal firewire ?
Aramis

Well, to tell you the truth, I'm bothered by the way the Audio Performance meter moves excitedly between 5% & 25% even when there's only one track open and no pugs! A friend told me not to worry about the meter as he thinks it's probably not accurate, but I could certainly use more convincing.
I have my studio settings set to only 4 stereo buses, prime secs @ 2.50, quantas @ 100 and work percent 92. Now maybe this is a glitch with Focusrites new model, but I seem to recall a lot of peoples issues being resolved by going the PCI firewire route.

I trashed prefs. What else could it be?

After re-reading your answer .......I am wondering ????
Firewire busses being internal or external should and could not normally use more or less CPU performances but would lead you to glitches and crakles in audio because of bad data tranferts . That is normally ....

Have you narrowed the problem to the i\o's ?
Could you redo a test with the normal MAC audio hardware ?
Aramis

I may have found the answer.

ATTENTION: My focusrite Saffire Pro just smoked out on me! LITERALLY!

My studio is full of smoke. Anyone thinking of buying this product had better think 3 times before you do.

I'm going to talk to my salesman & beg them to give me a trade for anything else.

Soliciting all opinions...if I can purchase any audio card under $1000 bucks what should I get?

I'm reposting this warning for all.