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The mixing board/interface I use to record my music uses firewire instead of USB. Normally, my computer (Gateway DX4300 I believe) runs pretty silent (Antec 650w PSU) except when I'm playing WoW or Counterstrike, but I assume that's more of my graphic card fan. When I use the mixing board, the fans become noticeably louder. I assume that the fan noise isn't my graphics card fan, since I do nothing different graphically speaking. The fan noise shows can show up when I set up a room mic, depending on how hot I set the gain for that mic. While that's not a necessary mic to have, I think it adds a pretty cool sound to the signal. So that brings me to my situation/question.

I'm hoping that picking up a PCI firewire card will alleviate this issue. I'm curious if using the firewire works the mobo too hard causing the computer to heat up and the fan to kick on to keep it cool. Is this normal strain placed on a computer when using firewire? If this will work, is there a good card to pick up, preferably at Fry's and/or Best Buy so I can get it before I record again this weekend.

Thanks.

I suspect that the driver for the firewire board is simply poorly designed and makes the processor work hard. Before you give up, make sure:

* Motherboard chipset drivers are up to date
* Firewire drivers are up to date
* Mixer/interface drivers are up to date
* BIOS is up to date

It may be that this problems has been noticed and solved already. If this doesn't work, then you'll find that a mid-range sound card (don't go super cheap - they put all the effort into software instead of the hardware) should reduce your processing load.

Sound card? Do those have firewire inputs? Or did you mean firewire card? If you were referring to a sound card for reviewing, I'm sticking with the mixing board for now.

I know the mixer's driver is up to date because i just recently checked to see if there was a Windows 7 driver for it. The others, I haven't checked. Thanks for the reminder. I always forget to do that.

If that doesn't work, you could also try downloading something like speed fan to see if you can tell which fan is speeding up and making the noise. It may be cheaper to buy a good quality silent fan to replace it if it's an easy one to replace.

Seconding the above. Firewire is a bus-based protocol. Unlike USB, it doesn't require as much CPU power for the same amount of speed (which is why musicians love it--lower latency and all that). However, Firewire provides its own bus power, which it draws from your main computer's PSU. You may be able to cut down the amount of noise your system makes by using your mixing board's auxiliary power brick (if it came with one) so that it doesn't have to leech its main power from your computer.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Seconding the above. Firewire is a bus-based protocol. Unlike USB, it doesn't require as much CPU power for the same amount of speed (which is why musicians love it--lower latency and all that). However, Firewire provides its own bus power, which it draws from your main computer's PSU. You may be able to cut down the amount of noise your system makes by using your mixing board's auxiliary power brick (if it came with one) so that it doesn't have to leech its main power from your computer.

Click to expand...

If it didn't come with it's own power brick (or even have a power port), a powered Firewire hub would achieve the same goal, right?

Should, yes. And then you will find out if providing the extra power really was the issue. A single FW port can happily supply about 20W (it can actually max at about 45W) drawn off the 12V line of your PSU, so your FW port could theoretically be drawing as much power as a GF 8600GT GPU.

--Patrick

As an update:

I bought an SIIG firewire card (VIA chipset based) that significantly reduced the fan issue. I returned it after ordering a Koutech card from newegg that had a TI chipset. That card has completely reduced the fan issue, or at least it hasn't been an issue since I've started using it last week.

I ended up reformatting my computer with a fresh install of Windows 7 using my wife's upgrade disc (was a cinch). At the end, I was getting a BSOD any time I went into edit a .wav file while the board was connected to the computer and powered on. After a little digging, I found that this was possibly due to the lack of TI chipset I was using (neither my mobo or the SIIG card were TI chipset), the upgrade from Vista 64 to Win7 instead of a fresh install of Win7, and/or the driver itself. So far, the fresh install coupled with the TI chipset card seems to have alleviated the issue, though I admit to not doing a lot of recording lately.

FWIW, if you have the choice, you always want to choose TI whenever possible, especially when dealing with audio stuff. VIA is known to have issues with audio gear.

--Patrick