Wednesday, June 27, 2001

Introduction

Now that we've finished off the review of the MSI 52X CD-ROM, it's time to take a look at the MSI 12X DVD-ROM - a jack of many trades that's also capable of reading CDs at 40X speed. Let's take a look.

Installation

The installation procedure for the MSI 12X DVD-ROM is no more complicated that of any other CD system, except for the necessary installation of a DVD-reading utility.

Test results

All tests were performed under Windows98 and the following system configuration:

Motherboard: MSI Pro266 Master
CPU: Intel Pentium III 4 CuMine FC-PGA 1GHz
Memory: 256MB OCZ Performance Series PC2100 CAS2
Primary IDE port controller: Quantum KA 9.1gig ATA66 hardrive
Secondary IDE port controller: MSI 12X DVD-ROM
OS: Win98 build 4.10
DirectX: 8.0

CD Tach 98 version 2.00

As a CD-reader, the MSI 12X DVD-ROM is a slower contender than much of the competition we pitted it against, but still quite normal for a 40X reading speed.

These results demonstrate that the MSI 12X DVD-ROM is a bit faster at sequential reads than MSI's own 52X CD-ROM.

Sisoft Sandra 2001se

Above you can see our Sisoft Sandra 2001se results...

Here again, MSI's DVD-ROM scores lower than their CD-ROM. That said, it's perfectly normal considering the different reading speeds of the two devices.

Digital Audio Extraction under Win98

Here, you can see that the MSI DVD-ROM is surprisingly faster at extracting digital audio-files than the 52X CD-ROM from the same manufacturer.

Musical Sound-Test.

The musical playback quality of the MSI 12X DVD-ROM was quite good. We found the sound-quality to be excellent, and noted no particular distortion, or sour notes.

DVD Playback.

The DVD playback of the MSI 12X DVD-ROM was quite pleasing to behold. Image quality was superb, and was transferred to screen without discontinuity or skippage, thus allowing users to view their DVDs with perfect visual comfort.

Conclusions

The only problem we encountered with this drive was its refusal to read certain disks. For whatever reason, some of the CDs we attempted to load - disks that have functioned with other drives - simply didn't function with the MSI 12X DVD-ROM. Otherwise, it scored slightly less brilliant scores than its 52X CD-ROM sibling, but still performed like a champ in terms of performance, and ease of use. As expected, it also handles a variety of disk formats, such as DVD-R, and CD-R.

For more information, please visit Micro-Star.