firewire card question

[PL_Kuba]

hey all,
I have a stupid question regarding my pci to firewire card to capture video from DV camera. This card is about 9 years old and I don't have any documentation nor cd with drivers. I don't even know what brand it is. Is Windows XP able to handle that? This card has also 4 pin molex connector on it, should I hook it up to power supply?
thanks,

[not important]

I would suggest looking for any kind of numbers on the card and do a Google search for drivers.

[rwest]

XP will most likely find it and not recognize it untill you get a proper driver for the card. It will most likely show up in device manager as an unidentified device, if it doesn't- then turn everything back off and plug in the power. You may get lucky and XP may recognize the type of device and load a generic driver.

If you can't find any information by googleiing any nummbers found on the card, XP's actually pretty good with legacy products. It really does help to identify the product yourself though.

[PL_Kuba]

thank you for your replies guys, I did not find any drivers for this card on the internet. I found out what the molex connector is for though. I understood that when you hook up more devices, then you need external power for this card. It apparently does not have enough Watts. So I plugged it to the ps and turned it on. Windows XP did recognize the card and advised me that it is ready to use. I captured video without problems. Next question is: there are different transfer rates of those cards on the market , computer captures video while it's playing so the throughput should be identical with every card, right? or maybe does the transfer rate affect quality?
tx again

[rwest]

I'm actually just getting into the video editing of AV input data, and am not sure if quality will be effected by a transfer rate. But since video editing is heavily cpu and ram intensive I would suspect if it was possible to adjust the rate of data input this would greatly improve the probability of the unit handling the process easier therefore creating a better outcome.