fire wire question

I have a client who wishes to use the features of his camcorder on his pc. It requires fire wire connection. He has a AMD 1.2Ghz processor, 256 ram, 32 meg video card. My question is, can I use the pci to fire wire cards that are out there now to fulfill his needs or should I upgrade his motherboard to one that has onboard firewire capabilities? How will performance be affected between the two options?
Thank you in advance.

Mike