The Artec Dual DVDR/RW Drive
A Quality DVDR/RW for Less

By, Jeff Bouton
March 17, 2004

HotHardware Test Systems
It's Snappy

 

Artec Dual DVDR/RW
Plextor PX-708UF DVDR/RW
Albatron PX875 Pro Motherboard

BFG Asylum GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 128MB

Pentium 4-C @ 2.4GHz

512MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 DDR-RAM

Western Digital 30GB ATA-100 7200RPM Hard Drive

Creative 52X CD-ROM

Windows XP Pro SP-1

DirectX 9.0b

NVIDIA Forceware v53.03

Utilities and Media Used For Testing
 

  • SiSoft SANDRA Pro 4

  • Nero InfoTool

  • Nero CD DAE

  • Nero CD-DVD Speed

  • Nero Burning ROM 6

  • An audio CD 63:33:02 in Length for MP3 Encode Test

  • 4.0GB of AVI files for Sandra DVD Data Tests

  • 3.9GB of AVI files for Nero DVD Data Tests

  • 698MB AVI file for Sandra CD Data Tests

  • 703MB of MP3 files for Nero CD Data Tests

  • Underworld on DVD for all DVD Movie Tests

  • Pearl Jam - Riot Act for DAE Tests

  • Media Used:
    -Philips 40X CD-R
    -Memorex 4x DVD-R
    -TDK 4X DVD+R

 

To help give us an idea of the Artec Dual DVD's performance, we ran a series of common tests to paint a clear performance picture.  As with any test, however, without a frame of reference, the results can be somewhat ambiguous.  So we ran the same tests on a Plextor PX-708UF dual format drive for comparison.  We also wanted to note that while the Plextor drive supports both FireWire and USB 2.0, we completed all of our tests while connected through USB 2.0.

 

CD-ROM Performance Tests - Artec Dual DVDR/RW Drive
Speeding Things Along

Nero InfoTool:

To start things off we ran Nero InfoTool to give a clear breakdown of the Artec Dual DVDR/RW's feature set. 

Artec DVDR/RW
PLEXTOR PX-708UF

Essentially the Artec Dual DVD drive offers the same overall feature set as the better known competitor, minus Mt Rainier support.  While Mt Rainier allows for easy drag and drop functionality, it needs to be natively supported by the OS to be utilized.  Since this is not yet available with most of today's OSes, this isn't a major strike against this otherwise capable drive.


SiSoft SANDRA Pro 4:

We ran the Sandra CD/DVD test module with a CD data disk and DVD data disk to test the read performance capabilities of each drive.  For Sandra's CD data tests, the benchmark utility requires a CD with large files be inserted.  For this test we used a CD with a single AVI file that was almost 700MB in size. For the DVD data test, a DVD+R disk with 4GB of AVI files was used. 

Read Performance - CD Data

Artec DVDR/RW
PLEXTOR PX-708UF

With the CD data read test, the Artec drive was only able to hit a buffered read speed of 925KB/s compared to the Plextor drive which peaked at 21MB/s.  We should also note that the Average access time of the Artec drive was significantly slower than the Plextor drive, hitting 743 ms compared to 428 ms.  These two factors gave the Plextor drive a slight lead in the overall results.

Read Performance - DVD Data

Artec DVDR/RW
PLEXTOR PX-708UF

With DVD data read testing, the performance gap continued, with the Artec drive falling just short of 1MB/s buffered reads compared to 20MB/s with the comparison drive.  The Artec drive also suffered from poor Average Access Times, hitting 628 ms compared to the Plextor drive at a snappier 328 ms.  Nonetheless, these performance gaps only resulted in minor differences in overall scores.

More Nero Tests