Do you I need new hardware for Firewire?

I was thinking of upgrading to an Audio Interface that uses Firewire.
But I don't believe my PC has firewire. Is it just a PCI card that I need to install to get firewire or is it something else?

Thanks.
And will Firewire and a Firewire compatible Audio Inteface be a signifigant improvement over a USB Audio Interface like an M-Audio Mobile Pre?

Just looking to improve my performance and latency. But if it's not a big difference I can hold off.

TomN,

Yes you will have an improvement over USB if you have more than one device connected to the USB interface. The reason is that with a firewire interface the protocol is handled by the device and firewire I/O on the computer. With USB the computers processor has to handle the protocol exchange thereby taking up processing speed that can be used for the DAW. Additionally as you add more devices to the USB port the slower the bit rate becomes in data transfer because the CPU has to handle the load rather than the Hardware I/O. For optimum performance though you might want to look at a PCI card that operates as an audio interface. This will help immensely in reducing any processing delays introduced by the processing of audio.

So you might want to weigh the cost of the PCI firewire card and external audio interface vs internal PCI audio interface. Of course I am assuming that you have a Desktop and not a Notebook.

Scook. No worries, it's just me making assumptions. It could be that I'm off the mark, and just dropped a bad idea or two. Then again you know how assumptions go.