Well, Adaptec has joined this increasing list of companies developing FireWire products. Their new FireConnect 4300 is a PCI adapter card for your computer. It features three isochronous ports delivering 300Mb/sec or for easier reference about 50MB/sec. The FireConnect 4300 also features the inclusion of MGI Videowave 4 DV editing software for all those video editing folks out there.

PIII 1Ghz
128MB PC133 SDRAM
Maxtor 60GB Hard Drive
Belkin PCI FireWire Card
Adaptec FireConnect 4300
Hercules Game Theater XP
Visiontek Geforce2 Ultra
3COM 3C905 10/100 NIC
Belkin Phoneline 10X PCI Adapter

For a comparison, I thought I would match the FireConnect 4300 up against the Belkin FireWire PCI card that I reviewed last month and see if there was any difference between the two since they have different controller chips. The Belkin FireWire card has a controller manufactured by Lucent and the Adaptec's is manufactured by Texas Instruments..

Unfortunately I was unable to locate a device or test that would utilize the full bandwidth of the FireWire bus. I did, however, run tests to determine the consistency in bandwidth between both cards. To do this I used the Maxtor 80GB FireWire External Storage.
I used Winbench 99's Disk Transfer Rate test to determine if there were any fluctuations in bandwidth consistency between the two FireWire cards when conducting transfers on the Maxtor FireWire drive. I also conducted six runs on each card of Sisoft Sandra's hard drive benchmarking tool and then averaged the results.

Here are the results:

Winbench 99 DTR Comparison

(FireConnect 4300)

(Belkin FireWire Card)

Winbench 99

Sisoft Sandra

Adaptec Average - 14028.83333
Belkin Average - 14036.33333

Starting with the Winbench DTR comparison, it can be seen that the sustained transfer rates between the two are almost identical. There is only a very small discrepancy between them, not enough in my opinion to deem one better than the other.

In the Winbench disk playback results it can be seen that there is no consistent winner here either. The results fluctuate back and forth between the two with one adapter winning by only a very small amount.

The Sisoft Sandra results fluctuated each time I ran them, that is why I decided to take the average of six consecutive tests performed on each card. The results again show a very close tie between the two.

I also conducted some real-world transfer tests on the two cards. On both adapters, an 89.7MB file structure moved in exactly 8 secs.

Overall, I am unable to determine a real winner between the two. In some tests the Adaptec wins, in others it is the Belkin. In real world testing, however, they were exactly the same.

The only real difference between the two cards that I found has nothing to do with performance but with features and software. Belkin's FireWire card ships with a power supply connection built onto the FireWire card. This allows for connection to your power supply in order to provide an extra boost of power for devices if required. However, the chance that you would actually need that much power is probably very slim unless you plan on connecting a lot of power hungry devices to your FireWire card. It is just an extra added safety net for the consumer. On the other hand, if you are purchasing a FireWire card for image and video editing, the Adaptec card comes with MGI VideoWave 4, the latest version available from MGI. Belkin's card, however, only ships with version 3.