Anand
has recently run this drive from parent company Quanta storage (QSI) through his review process. Based on the Philips Nexperia chipset, this is one of the first drives to debut with 8X DVD+R functionality. They pose the question, can it dethrone their current champion, the Plextor 708A? In their mind, the Plextor drive has limited CDR capabilities and bundled features. Plus, a higher price tag due to the dual format capability. Also, at around 160 dollars US for the Nu Tech, maybe you won't find the lack of DVD minus an issue. They remark that with Sony announcing new drives that look as though they will not support 8x DVD-R, just maybe DVD+ is pulling ahead in the format war.
| The Nu Tech DDW-081 is based on one of the newer Philips chipsets, the PNX7850. Philips is a great company for documentation, so you can read the whole whitepaper on the chipset here . The chipset itself is fairly basic '” 32-bit MIPS RISC processor with DSP, DMA66 and audio processor. Obviously, manufacturers try to pull as much functionality as possible into the integrated processor; therefore, eliminating the cost of additional chips or additional processing power.
What bothers us about this chipset is that it only technically supports 4X DVD+R and DVD+RW. What further bothers us even more is that it supports 16X DVD read, while our DVD drive is only capable of 12X. However, features like 3mm scratch handling and adjustable laser strength (think PowerRec from Plextor) are comforting. Just recently, Nu Tech confirmed with us that the Philips Nexperia PNX7850 is in fact capable of 8X DVD+R because it has been optimized by Nu Tech/QSI engineers. |
The review goes on to say: Our biggest disappointment was attempting to burn 4X media to 8X, which our Plextor 708A drive was capable of doing. Particularly, we saw disappointing 4X results with the Yuden and Ricoh media that the Plextor rips through at 8X. In an 8X DVD+R burn with some MMC media (CD Speed reports CLV instead of Z-CLV) the burn starts at 6X and then adjusts to 8X Z-CLV. However, it looks apparent that there are some stability issues at that speed, since we see several stop gaps in the burn. Perhaps we are seeing the 4X Nexperia PNX7850 chipset showing its incapability to run out of spec.
Source: anandtech.com
