The Artec 52X 24X 52X CD-RW Series
The drive is on fire, we don't need no water, let that baby burn!

By Tom Laverriere
June 24, 2003

Nero CD Speed will be our measuring tool for this next test as well, but this time we'll be popping an audio CD, 78 minutes in length, in both drives.  Besides speed ratings, Nero CD Speed will also show us how well the drive rips tracks.

Benchmarks and Comparisons Continued Can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen

Nero CD Speed - Audio:

                                       
A key performance metric shown here is the Digital Audio Extraction ( DAE ) quality of each drive.  Both the Artec and MSI drives managed a DAE of 10 which is a perfect score.  All those looking to rip audio tracks will not only find that the Artec drive rips tracks relatively fast, but also rips them with quality in mind.  On another note, the Artec CD-RW falls a bit behind in the speed portion of this test.  The seek times of the Artec drive are on par with its MSI competitor, but the actual read speeds are quite a bit lower.  The Artec drive manages an average read speed of 32.07x compared to MSI's 39.74x.  Notice that the start and end speeds of the Artec drive were also a substantial margin behind. 

MP3 Encoding With Easy CD-DA Extractor:

Because Nero Express does not time the ripping process, we opted to use Easy CD-DA Extractor to rip all 14 tracks from the disc.  Not only does the Easy CD-DA Extractor time this process for us, it provides quite a few more options for the conversion quality and many other settings, making it superior to Nero Express when it comes to ripping.  We extracted all tracks at a quality setting of 320 Kb/s.

The MSI drive manages a six second lead over its Artec counterpart.  Again, such a small separation in timings would have to mean these two drives are in the same ballpark, performance wise, for this benchmark.

Disc Copy with Nero 5.5.10.35
 

In the last test we used the RedHat Linux 8 Disc 1 Image ( 651MB ) to burn to three different kinds of media using Nero Burning ROM v5.5.10.35 which is the latest update provided by Nero.  These times are taken from the moment we click on the Burn button to the moment the writing session closed.  The reason we used three different kinds of media was to see how well each drive does with disc recognition and burn times, across a few different disc manufacturers.  Even though a burner may be rated at 52X, if it has difficulties identifying burn speeds for blank CD's, the maximum burn speed may never be achieved.

The MSI drive proves our point of a fast drive not being able to use its full capabilities as it recognized two of the three discs below their rated speeds.  The Artec drive had no such problems as it burned two of the three discs above their rated speeds and one disc at the rated speed.  When compared at 52X, the MSI CD-RW drive managed a 20 second lead over the Artec burner.  Since the 52X burn happened with two different types of media, its hard to say why there was a 20 second difference at the same speed.  Also notice how there was only an eight second difference between the 52X burn and the 40X burns for the Artec drive.  While 52X is not much faster than 40X, we would have liked to see a bit more of a performance boost between the two speeds at better than eight seconds.

ARTEC 52X 24X 52X BURNER:

In our first outing with a piece of hardware bearing the Artec insignia, we'd have to say we were impressed.  We didn't experience any major problems with the drive in our series of tests.  What Artec provided us was a fast CD-RW drive that any enthusiast would enjoy.  With that said, we did find a few shortcomings with the drive.  Considering our setup is an open air configuration, we noticed the drive tended to get a bit loud when spinning up.  While the acoutics may not be as noticeable if the drive were mounted in a case, its always nice to have a drive operate a bit quieter than the Artec drive has shown us.  The burn speeds of the Artec were up to par with other 52X burners, but its read times were a bit lacking especially when running an audio CD in this unit.  The slower read speeds were not painstakingly slower, but upgrading to this drive may not bring huge gains in burn times either,  if you already own a 40X CD-RW drive or faster.  Finally, at a minimum, throwing a blank CD-R in as part of the bundle would have been nice considering that is an industry standard for this type of hardware. 

A quick price check on this drive weighs in at only $36.  While prices have been steadily dropping on this type of hardware, Artec manages to come it at the lowest price point we've seen to date with any 52X CDRW product.  So, if you currently own a 40X CD-RW drive or higher, it would be hard to recommend an upgrade.  Although at this price point, if you've got a few extra dollars to spare, it's a small investment.  However, if you haven't kept up with the ever increasing speeds of the CD-RW sector, now is the time to hop on that bandwagon, since the Artec 52X burner will give you decent performance and your wallet will be smiling too.

We're going to give the Artec 52X 24X 52X Series CD-RW Drive a HotHardware Heat Meter Rating of...

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