SUMMARY: Today we step aside from the usual motherboard or processor review and take a look at two of the latest DVD burners to emerge from two large Taiwanese companies, ASUS and Gigabyte. Both drives support DVD burning at 16x and both support Dual Layer burning. If you're on the market for a new DVD burner, one of these might be what you're looking for.
Processor: Intel Pentium 560 (800MHz FSB) (Supplied by Spectrum Communications) Memory: 2x 512MB DDR2-533 Micron Hard Disk: 2x Maxtor Maxline III 250GB RAID 0 Motherboard: ASUS P5AD2-E Premium (Supplied by ASUS Australia) Graphics Card: ATI Radeon X800XT Platinum (Supplied by ASUS Australia) Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP SP2
For our tests we recorded onto each type of media to determine which drive over a series of three tests was the fastest. We did three runs and averaged out the results. We used 4.3GB movie images from one of my 4x4 club trips to do our single layer and doubled the movie for the Dual Layer tests to fill the disks to capacity.
Here in all tests the drives are pretty well evenly matched, however, in the Dual Layer tests, ASUS pulled ahead. When testing we found that the ASUS drive was able to overspeed the Dual Layer disks better than the Gigabyte drive.
