If you own an H8000FW and use its FireWire connection, this info may be very useful to you all.
In 2020 I decided to move on to Windows10 from Win7 AND to build myself a new PC running on one of these mighty Ryzen CPUs. I also have a couple of Mac rigs. Old ones…. I don’t want to deal with current Apple nonsense AT ALL!
So I built this amazing machine using an Asus Prime X570Pro, a Ryzen 5 3600, 32 gigs of RAM. I ordered a FireWire card with VIA chipset and that didn’t work right. Actually Win10 recognized and installed drivers fine but the H8000FW would go thru an endless sample rates switching loop, finally crashing the computer. Tried a couple of times… no go!
I got a second FireWire PCIEcpress card, based on the Texas Instruments chip, which is known to work much better for audio. But this was even worst.
The computer would not boot at all, staying on a dark screen. Not even possible to get into the UEFI.
Apparently AMD and FireWire are a bit of a quirk? Or maybe Win10 adds its part of evil to the equation?
Turns out BOTH!!!
I did some research and looks like a lot of people have been having issues on AMD/Win10 based computers on their FW cards, which were all working fine. It seems that the last 2 Win10 updates have been a problem and AMD or the motherboard producers have done changes to the UEFI (BIOS).
This guy reports:
“So what happened is that AMD turned on a 10-bit Tag Field, which is only available on PCI-e
Gen4 devices. This results in compatibility issues with older Gen PCI-e cards like my firewire card.
So I went into my BIOS and searched for the 10-bit tag field and disabled it. Also put the
compatibility on Gen3 for the PCI-E slot I inserted my Firewire card afterward and voila systems
boot and Windows 10 even loaded the ‘ Texas Instruments 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller’
driver in the device Manager. Hooked up my TC Electronic Konnekt Live firewire soundcard and it
is working”.
The discussion is here: https://www.soundonsound.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=69651&start=15
I trusted him and tried myself:
-boot into the PC EFI and go to Advanced Mode
-Advanced menu > AMD CBS > NBIO Common Options and here there’s a PCIe Ten Bit Tag Support that was set on Auto. I changed it to Disable.
-then move to Onboard Devices Configuration and changed my PCIEX1_3 Mode from Auto to Gen3, that’s for the socket where the FWire card will be installed.
-saved and rebooted. Reinstalled the TI FireWire card. Rebooted again…
PC posts fines, no issues, and device managed shows the TI chipset working fine with the proper
driver installed automatically.
I installed Eventide FW driver DICE V5.5 and things run pretty good. Some minor quirks but they should be expected at first. It looks ok.
So… I just wanted to provide you this info as it may be useful for people out there, considering more and more users are switching to AMD for its superior performance, lower cost and better support of sockets in time.
After 2 years my H8000FW is rocking solid on the described Win10 system!
I am cautiously confident that latest FireWire drivers might work fine on Win11 too. Try!
