PCIe Firewire Card requires Power Supply?

The card you mentioned does not draw power for the Firewire ports from the PCIe bus, instead, power is provided from an onboard 4 pin molex connector, the same type of power connector used on many IDE drives.

You can find a 4 pin molex power connector on the back of your DVD "superdrive" in your G5. You will need a Y power adapter, and a cable to run power to the card you installed. I would guess that the Y adapter came with the card, but you probably will need power cable with a four pin male molex connector on one end, and a 4 pin female molex connector on the other in order to reach the card.

You should be able to find these type of power cables at just about any store that sells computer hardware.

Tom N.

I couldn't find a Apple-supported PCIe Firewire card on the SIIG site. Which one is it? Also, I have had exactly 0 of the 3 SIIG products I have bought in the past work correctly.

-s

I purchased the SIIG 3-port FireWire PCIe card, and connected its aux. power to my Superdrive power connector.

I have had no boot problems, but I always reset the nvram and the PRAM, then unplug the machine again for about 10 minutes every time I install a PCIe card in one of the dual-core Macs. Seems to avoid boot problems.

Maybe that made the difference, or maybe the 2-port card is just different somehow?

I do see lower throughput than the built-in FireWire ports, but that's a subject for a different forum topic. 😉

Great! 'Glad it's working for you!

I'm trying to install the 3 port SIIG Firewire 800 card and tried using the supplied power cable. It seemed to work at first but now the DVD player doesn't work. Removed the power cable and the Firewire card ceased to work.Removed the card and re-connected as before but no DVD. Any suggestions?

It's possible that you have a bad connector on your power splitter cable. Do you have a meter or continuity tester so that you can pull the cable out, and test that all 12 connectors work?

If the cable's seated properly into your DVD drive's power socket (in the middle of the cable), and one end is connected firmly to the power connector that used to go to the DVD drive, and the other is firmly attached to the card, you should be OK unless your cable is bad.

I also have had this card fail to be recognized intermittently. Sometimes unplugging the machine for a few minutes solves it. Other times I just work on the machine for a while, reboot, and it shows up then.

Since this card is being used successfully in so many PCs (or so I hear from SIIG), it may be an issue with the way the G5 implements PCIe. I wouldn't be surprised, as many of us are getting lower throughput with our FireWire 800 PCIe cards than we get via the built-in FW800 ports. Maybe there's an issue yet to be addressed.

Yeah, turns out that SIIG sent me a power cable with +12v and +5V reversed...Burned out my Superdrive..thank you SIIG! The card seems to work although it didn't yesterday. Hmmm.
(Always check your cables)

Oh, how do you reset the nvram and PRAM?
Thanks.

I hope SIIG is offering to pay for the SuperDrive!

To reset the nvram, first boot into Open Firmware (hold down command + option + O + F as your computer starts up, then release when it tells you to 🙂, the type these three commands, followed by the RETURN key after each line:

reset-nvram
set-defaults
reset-all

After that last line, the machine reboots. You can then hold down command + option + P + R until you hear the startup chime a second time to ensure you have reset your PRAM.

Sometimes you also need to shut down and unplug your computer for a while to make the SIIG card show up. What a pain!

-- Steve

Sounds familiar. The first card I received was DOA. Second card seems ok, but it has only been a few hours. My vendor talked to SIIG who claims the 3 port PCIe 800 is guaranteed with the dual core Macs, but not the dual-dual (quad) Mac. No one was sure quite why.