PCI firewire card and Firewire cabling specifics (cable colour details and pin layout)

[dizietsma99]

I bought a generic firewire card from Scan.co.uk (mboard doesn't have firewire on it).

Installed fine (PnP under XP, no drivers needed). I don't have a firewire product to test it yet though; I bought it since it was on offer and am soon to get a firewire video camera.

2 questions about the card:
4 pictures available (details below)

1) What's the 4 pin connector for? It does fit a Power Supply Plug (small, or floppy size) but I'm not going to leave it plugged in and turn it on until I verify that it IS for that.
And if it is a power connector, why would the card need one? Can't it pull its power from the PCI bus? I know power-hungry cards like GPUs need more power than the PCI or PCIe bus can deliver, but would FireWire need so much?

2) I also bought a front panel breakout patch bay with a FireWire socket which I want to use (instead of the back of the machine where the PCI cards are).
Obviously, it comes as they all do with a motherboard connector.(See links to photos below)

There's an internal FireWire socket on the card (on photo), but the two can't be joined as they are. I'm quite happy to cut a Firewire cable and splice the cables so that the breakout panel can be used with the Internal FireWire socket but need to know the cabling assignments first.
I've looked online but can't find anything that matches my Panel breakout cable colours or positions.

The breakout cable does actually fit on the mystery socket on the card but surely FireWire needs more than 4 of its pins connected for it to work? I haven't tried that yet (would need convincing).
Anyone got any ideas?

Many TIA.

Card
Breakout Cable (Photo 1)
Breakout Cable (Photo 2)
Breakout Cable (Photo 3)

 

[Paperdoc]

The three ports on the back bracket and the metal-enclosed one on the board are all "standard" S400 Firewire (or IEEE 1394) 6-wire ports. NOTE that many card makers wired up the one on the board surface exactly in parallel with one of the three on the back bracket. You only have 3 ports, not 4. So if you use the board-side one (e.g., to connect to your front panel adapter) you cannot use ONE of the back bracket ports at the same time. I just don't know which one.

There is a 4-pin version of the firewire port (it just eliminates the two power lines from the 6-pin cable) and that COULD be what the bare 4-pin connector is for. However, I am not sure because the standard 4-pin cable-end connector certainly does NOT look like that.

More details: Google "Firewire", read the Wikipedia entries and others.

As far as your front-panel adapter and its 9-pin connector, it reminds me of the way many motherboard makers use a "Intel standard" 10-pin connector to plug in cables from front-panel outlets. For example, I have an ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe motherboard. If you go here:
http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us
you can elect to download the manual for it. On Page 2-30 it shows the two IEEE1394 connectors on the motherboard and how they are used with the adapter plate / bracket supplied by ASUS to provide ports on the back of the case. You will see that each port has its own 10-position connector with one pin not used; looks a lot like your connector. The manual also details exactly which pin is which in this system, so cross-reference that to the 6-pin IEEE1394 cable connector info from Google / Wikipedia.