Buying new computer soon(tm)

[KvHagedorn]

Plextor has always had better build quality in my experience. That's the most important thing.

[Dr Mordrid]

Dogbert;

MSI makes an excellent P4 board with a SiS 645 chipset, which has the same multi-threaded I/O as the Athlon chipsets. Might want to see if they have that one in Israel.

Dr. Mordrid

[William]

Originally posted by Dogbert


I've found one LiteOn CD-Burner in an online shop here but it costs as much as the Plextor, which is better then ?

There's not much difference in quality between Plextor & the rest of the field anymore -particularly in their support departents. Having said that, if it was me I would still get the Plextor

[az]

c't had some problems with the Plextor burner, when it came to copying copy protected stuff (can't remember what it was exactly, though). They tested an Asus burner, too, which worked flawlessly.

AZ

[Dogbert]

Dr.

We have the P4 SIS boards here, namely:

MSI MS-6547
ASUS P4S333-ML
ASUS P4S333-VML
ASUS P4S533/A - which seems really super cool


But I thought I should better show my support for AMD and go with an XP system (not to mention the CPU is cheaper)...

We have ASUS CD burners here as well but they have only 2 MB cache.
They're $20 cheaper.

[William]

Originally posted by az
c't had some problems with the Plextor burner, when it came to copying copy protected stuff (can't remember what it was exactly, though). They tested an Asus burner, too, which worked flawlessly.

AZ

ASUS, at my last check didn't actually make their own CD drives, they just badged. So you get a LiteOn one week, a Sanyo the next... I haven't seen any evidence to suggest this has changed recentley.

[az]

I'd have to look which Asus model they used, then you would be able to find out who the oem is

If you want.

AZ

[William]

Originally posted by az
I'd have to look which Asus model they used, then you would be able to find out who the oem is

If you want.

AZ

I can certainly try. The most popular ones are Sanyo, LiteOn, Ricoh (since they quit doing retail in the US, that's hardly a surprise). The easiest two places for spotting who actually made the drive are a) what it IDs as in device manager (I'm not kidding; some badgers do not bother customising even this!) or b) what for of buffer underrun protection it uses. BurnProof=Sanyo chipset, JustLink=Ricoh chipset, SMART-BURN=LiteOn/mediatek chipset (I think), ExactLink=Oak technologies chipset. Used by quite a lot of maufacturers unfortunately. Powerburn=Sony. I think that the Philips version is called "flexlink" -but couldn't swear to it. The Yamaha one if SafeBurn, but no one rebadges Yammy drives anymore, because they're hellish expensive, even in huge quantity.

Whew, what a lot

[Jake]

Originally posted by Dr Mordrid
Do not go with nVIDIA's NForce, VIA or the MaJiK if you can help it, especially on multimedia systems.

If I had to choose something other than the SiS chipsets I'd go with the AMD 76x's.

Dr. Mordrid

I had the Abit KG7-RAID in my system, but swapped it for an A7V333, as it had a sad tendency of spontanious reboots. I think it must have been the Highpoint controller causing the problems, but it could also have been the AMD760 chipset - who knows. Now it works like a charm with exactly the same hardware just different mobo.

/Jake

[Wombat]

Just the fact that it was an Abit lets us know what the problem was: it was an Abit.

[Dogbert]

Re: Buying new computer soon(tm)

Ok, I think this is going to be the final system:

Case: Enermax fs710B with 350W enermax power supply $128
MB: Asus A7V333-E-Audio $145
CPU: Athlon XP 1800 (retail box) $136
Mem: 512MB Transcend PC2700 $150
HDD: Maxtor 60GB D740X-6L $106
floppy (just in case) $11
DVD: Pioneer DVD-116/2 $69
Burner: Plextor 40x12x40 IDE $156
Net: 3com 3c905c-tx $40

Total: $ 941

I'll use my good onld G400 DH with it for some time.

Any last ideas / suggestions ?

[Dogbert]

hehe, I had a slot loading Pioneer x6 scsi RPC 1 DVD which was really great while it lasted
Too bad it died on me (stopped reading discs)

I too prefer slot loading cause it takes less space and it's easier to manipulate when copying CDs (you don't have 2 open trays.

The only minus is that you can't use non standard CD sizes.

edit: typos