Firewire is pretty much the same regardless of who makes the board. Most of the time they’ll even use the exact same chips. a good long time ago, I’ve seen $150 firewire cards that used the exact same Ti chips that the $40 card had.
If you are getting dropped frames in your videos, the likely culprits are going to be not enough RAM, too slow of a processor, hard drives that are too slow, or some combination of those. I never dump video directly onto an external hard drive because of this.
Just watch tose aspects, and you’ll be fine.
