Drives Compared:

Plextor PX-708A 8x DVDR/RW

Teac DV-W50D 4x DVDR/RW

Common Hardware:

Asus P4P800S-E (I848P)
Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz (800 MHz FSB)

512MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 DDR

20GB Western Digital ATA100 HD

ATi Radeon 9700 Pro

On-board AD1985 SoundMax audio

Standard Floppy Drive

Windows XP Professional SP1

Utilities and Media Used For Testing

SiSoft SANDRA 2004
Nero InfoTool
Nero CD-DVD Speed
Nero Burning ROM 6
Music Match 8.0 for MP3 Encoding
Media Used:
-Memorex 48X CD-R
-TDK 4x DVD+R

4.3GB of AVI files for DVD Data Tests
Daredevil DVD for DVD Movie Tests
698MB AVI File for Sandra's CD Test
702MB of MP3 files for CD Data Tests
Shania Twain "Up!" Audio CD, 73:06 in length used for CD Audio Tests
Crystal Method "Tweekend" Audio CD, 68:53 in length used for MP3 encoding

Nero InfoTool can give us a quick reference screen showing the various reading and writing capabilities of CD and DVD drives. We've opted to take screenshots comparing the Plextor PX-708A with another dual format drive; the Teac DV-W50D 4x DVD burner that we've used in past reviews. Except for the obvious difference in speed, the two should compare nicely.

Not only does the Plextor PX-708A have a faster DVD speed rating, the PX-708A completely dominated the CD reading and writing aspects as well. It can read and write at speeds up to 40x, putting its performance closer to that of dedicated CD-RW drives. The buffer size on each drive is set at 2MB , although we might have preferred to see the 8MB cache found on some of Plextor's other drives. Looking through the list of checked off features, both drives can read from a variety of media. The only difference here being the CD+G support on the PX-708A, which is a format usually used for Karaoke CDs. Likewise, in the writing formats supported section, the Plextor PX-708A had everything that the Teac DV-W50D had checked off, with the extra inclusion of Mount Rainier support. Mount Rainier technology consists of native OS support for dragging and dropping files to CD-RW or DVD-RW media, paving the way for replacing the floppy drive (in case it hasn't been already).

Next, we ran the CD/DVD-ROM benchmark from SiSoft Sandra 2004. We were not out to benchmark the two drives against each other, as the inherent speed differences would make the comparison meaningless. Instead, we've included these screenshots to show the relative performance of the drives. To run these two tests, we needed two discs that had large files on them. We used a CD-R with a single 698MB AVI file for the CD Data test, and likewise a DVD with multiple large AVI files totaling 4.3GB. Each disc was read, benchmarked, and then a score was shown comparing the performance to the other drives in Sandra's database.

The PX-708A bettered the Teac DV-W50D by nearly 400 points in this synthetic test, which would be exactly the difference we would have expected. Looking it mathematically, the PX-708A is rated at a CD read speed of 40x, which is 25% faster than a 32x drive, which the Teac DV-W50D was. The two benchmark scores produce the same exact ratio (2172-1748 then divide by 1748). When we checked the benchmark breakdown, we saw nearly identical average access times, although the buffered reads on the PX-708A were larger. Also note that the drive speed does not accurately reflect the maximum speed of the drive, but rather the initial speed, so these look much slower than the actual rating of each drive.

In the DVD Performance test, each drive got a bit of a boost in the drive index. The Plextor PX-708A still came out on top, with an overall higher score and drive speed, but the estimated average access time slipped a bit, and was close to 200ms behind the Teac. The 2991 kB/s from the PX-708A was the highest output of any drive we have seen so far, easily blowing away the scores from Sandra's database, which apparently need an update.