Friday, June 22, 2001

Introduction

Diversification is the name of the game for MSI. Already known as a prolific vendor of motherboards, MSI has chosen to present us with a little something else from their bag of tricks - the MSI 52X CD-ROM. Let's take a look.

Installation

Installation of the MSI CD-ROM is no different than with any other such CD-ROM drive. Under Windows, there's nothing much to do except activate the corresponding drive controller in the motherboard's BIOS. A disk is also supplied for use with DOS, which installs a number of drivers, and makes the proper modifications to the autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Personally, I prefer plugging CD-ROM drives into the secondary drive controller, so as not to disturb the bandwidth of my main drive.

Test results

All tests were performed under Windows 98, with 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 52X CD-ROM
OS: Win98 built 4.10
DirectX: 8.0

CD Tach 98 version 2.00

Needless to say, the MSI 52X drive was nose-to-nose with the 56X drive from Shuttle. This is a firm indication of just how fast the MSI 52X CD-ROM is.

In this test, the higher the number, the better the results. Thus we can see that the MSI drive posts slightly slower sequential read results than the Shuttle 56X.

Sisoft Sandra 2001se

Here we have the results from Sisoft Sanda 2001se...

The photo visualization test is a benchmark in which a suite of 80 1MB high-resolution images a rapidly loaded from CD. This provides an indication of the CD-ROMs bandwidth in terms of MB/sec. The higher the score, the better the drive's peformance.

Here again, we can see that MSI's drive isn't far behind the Shuttle CD-ROM.

Digital Audio Extraction under Win98

As you can see here, the MSI CD-ROM is limited to 8X speed when extracting digital audio files.

Music test.

The musical playback of the MSI 52X CD-ROM is superb. The quality was of terrific quality, and went by without any sour notes.

Conclusions

What we enjoyed the most about the MSI 52X CD-ROM was how quiet it was when operating. Unlike most CD-ROM drives, the MSI device was quiet as a whisper while in use. While we may have liked it to be just a bit faster, the MSI 52X proved itself to be very stable, easy to use, an easy on the ears. Once again, we have to give MSI credit for another fine addition to their catalogue.

For more information, please visit Micro-Star.