Introduction

DVD burners are undergoing dramatic changes right now. 8x burners have only been only the market for a little more than half a year and already 12x units are available, dual-layer DVD+R recorders are starting to reach market and 16x prototypes are in development. Of course, there are still problems locating high-speed DVD media to record onto. This means that prices for the current 8x recorders are starting to drop heavily and a number of lower cost manufacturers are making drives available.

MSI or Micro-Star International is primarily known as a manufacturer of computer motherboard components, but they have begun expanding into the peripheral markets with optical drives and graphics cards. They aim to be a low cost provider of high-quality optical drives.

Specifications

Contents of the MSI DR8-A2 Box

The MSI DR8-A2 is a multiformat 8x DVD burner. Here are the specifications for the unit:

The drive can handle all of the current popular formats. It does not support the new dual-layer DVD+R media or the very seldom seen or used DVD-RAM format. The model used in the testing is the DR8-A2B that has a black faceplate. It is identical to the DR8-A2 in all other aspects.

Benchmarking

All benchmarking of the MSI DR8-A2 drive was conducted using the CD-DVD Speed v3.0. This application tests all of the various attributes of CD and DVD media for both reading and writing of discs. All tests were conducted with the following hardware and software:

For testing of the drive, Memorex 8x media was used for the DVD+R and -R tests. CD testing was conducted using TDK 80min 52x CD-R media. Due to the limited availability of 4x rewritable DVD media, testing of the +RW and -RW formats was not conducted. DVD-ROM speed testing was done using the Unreal Tournament 2004 DVD edition.

Below are the results from the tests:

Overall the test numbers are very impressive. All of the speeds ended up very close to the specification numbers. The reading speed for the DVD+/-R media is lower than the DVD-ROM speeds, but this is fairly normal for the newer media compared to printed DVDs. It should be noted that the DVD-ROM test is below the rated 12x speed because the DVD only had 3.7GB of data, well below the single sided limit where it would reach its maximum speeds.

The one peculiar number is the CPU 1x reports for the DVD-R media. It was tested multiple times and always resulted in the 39% usage, well above the higher 2x and 4x speed. This is likely a quirk of the newer 8x DVD media. Another quirk that was noted during testing but not reflected in the charts was the drive start up speeds. After a CD or DVD is placed into the unit, the unit takes a very long time to spin the drive up and determine what type of disc it is. This was easily twice as long as other drives I have tested. Once the drive was up to speed though, it did run fairly quiet compared to previous drives I had used.

Software

The MSI DR8-A2 drive comes with a couple of software packages. For basic CD and DVD data authoring, there is the Nero 6 Express. This is a reduced feature set version of the popular Nero software package. It doesn't have the ability to do DVD video authoring, so MSI has included the Sonic MyDVD v4.5 software. Also included is the ArcSoft ShowBiz software for video editing prior to burning the DVD in MyDVD. Also included is InCD4 for packet writing to CD and DVD rewritable media.

Video Burning

Since a large number of consumers are purchasing DVD burners for the ability to generate their own DVD videos, it is important to test the included software for creating videos. Testing was done using the Sonic MyDVD and ArcSoft ShowBiz software. Testing was done by converting a 2 hour MPEG1 stream digitized through an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon graphics card and recorded onto the DVD-R and DVD+R 8x media.

The Sonic and ArcSoft software was fairly straightforward to use. Since the 2 hours of video was broken up between several clips, they were imported into ShowBiz to piece them together and outputted to an MPEG2 stream for the DVD recording. This process is generally the most intensive part and took several hours to complete. Once the completed MPEG2 file was completed, it was burned to the DVD media through the Sonic software. Recording times were about 8 minutes for each of the media types for 2 hours of video that took up roughly 75% of the total space on the DVD.

The final testing was to put the end DVDs into two consumer DVD players and test playback. The DVD+R media played back without any problems in the newer Sony DVD player. It did encounter some artifact problems when played back on a 1997 Pioneer DV-414 player. The DVD-R media once again had no problems in the newer Sony unit, but it failed to even read the disk in the older Pioneer unit. This demonstrates how important it is to check the media you will be recording on and its compatibility with the consumer DVD players that the disc will be used on.

Conclusions

Overall the MSI DR8-A2 is a very respectable DVD burner. It was able to burn each of the main recordable media types at the specification speeds. It does have a few drawbacks with its slow spin-up times and the quirky CPU usage for DVD-R media, but for the price of this drive, it is hard not to go for a dual 8x DVD burner over high-speed dedicated CD burners.

Manufacturer's Site