LinuxMusicians

Hi,
While looking for a motherboard that could be used for music production with firewire based interfaces I find it difficult to decide which one to buy.
My main concern would be latency issues with PCI add-on FW card vs. a FW port soldered on the motherboard. Has that been tested by anyone?
Since it is harder and harder to find a mobo with a FW port is a PCI(e) add-on card a viable solution for linux?
Also, should the same concern of latency apply to usb 3.0 or 2.0 for PCI(e) add-on cards?

Thank you for any input.

Does your interface manufacturer make any recommendations regarding the Firewire chip known to work well with their device? If so, then this is probably more important than whether it is sitting directly on the motherboard or on a card.

Not much of a hardware person, but I suspect that the pci[e] slots would be on the same bus as the built-on chip anyway.

Thad E Ginathom is spot on, the Firewire host controller chipset used is more important than the integration of the controller itself in the system. Besides, even if the controller is onboard it probably uses the PCIe subsystem internally. I've been using add-on cards for years and never had problems. I've also played around with systems with onboard FW with limited success because the controllers were not that great. (JMicron, VIA, O2, Ricoh). When using an add-on card make sure you use a recommended chipset, basically there are only two manufacturers that are worth considering, Texas Instruments and LSI/Agere.