Spring 2004 DVD Performance Roundup: More DVD Dual 8X
by Kristopher Kubicki on April 28, 2004 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Tech Support
One key item that we have overlooked in most of our optical display reviews is technical support. Our very our Evan Lieb originally pioneered the tech support benchmark for motherboards; and today, we will attempt to replicate that benchmark with our optical storage vendors.We took three camoflagued email addresses and emailed each vendor particularly trivial questions concerning our burners. If tech support was capable of responding to all 3 emails within 72 hours (3 business days), we averaged the three times together for a final result.
| Average Customer Support Response Time | |
| ASUS (Dec 2003) | No Response |
| ASUS (Mar 2004) | |
| ASUS (April 2004) | 66 hours, 20 minutes |
| AOpen (April 2004) | No Response |
| Gigabyte (Dec 2003) | 38 hours, 12 minutes |
| Gigabyte (April 2004) | No Response |
| LiteOn (Dec 2003) | 41 hours, 20 minutes |
| MSI (Dec 2003) | No Response |
| MSI (Mar 2004) | 27 hours, 11 minutes |
| NEC (Dec 2003) | 29 hours, 48 mintues |
| Nu Tech (Dec 2003) | N/A |
| Nu Tech (April 2004) | No Response |
| Plextor (Dec 2003) | 11 hours, 10 minutes |
| Sony (Dec 2003) | 6 hours, 44 minutes |
| Sony (April 2004) | 7 hours, 21 minutes |
| Toshiba (April 2004) | N/A |
We retested our ASUS tech support email under the suspicion that our tech support emails were being filtered by spam software. We worked with ASUS to rectify the problem, and the results for this roundup were much more favorable. As with the other benchmarks on ASUS' tech support, we found almost every answer to our questions from their website. An important thing to consider with ASUS' tech support email: if you do not receive an email confirmation within 30 minutes of your initial request, your email has probably been blocked by their spam software. Using their tech support line, (510) 995-0883, seems to be the best solution for immediate help.
AOpen and Gigabyte both had similar problems. For both manufacturers, your information must be entered into a form and then your problem should be answered within 48 hours. Unfortunately, neither website sent us a confirmation after submission, and neither website responded to our questions within 72 hours.
NuTech has a contact information page that brings up an email window for you to email some of their technical contacts directly. There are some general FAQs on their website, but they do not have the knowledge base of AOpen or ASUS just yet.
Since we received our Toshiba drive very late in the review, we did not have the opportunity to test customer support response time before the publish date of this article.
Again, Sony leads the pack in product support, and not just in the timed response aspect. Not only were we able to find all of our questions answered in their FAQ section, but there was also an online email submit form. Probably the icing on the cake was Sony's instant help chat. The first two questions we asked took less than 30 seconds for a Sony rep to walk us through. The third question took about two minutes. The rep also emailed us a log of our conversation for later. The live chat is available 24 hours a day. The extra cost of a Sony drive is easily justifiable if product support is an important issue.
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CrazeeHorse - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - link
Kristopher, define what you mean by performance. If you mean burn speed, of course it will be similar in different drives that use the same chipset, as their burn speeds are defined by the chipset! However, if you take a wider view,IMO, performance also refers to the burn strategies,media compatibility, media preferences.. all of which can vary from drive to drive, even if they are based on the same chipset. Case in point.. Pioneer 107 and NEC 2500A use the same co-developed chipset. However, NEC allows burning of certain 4X +R media (eg. RicohJPNR01) at 6X, while Pioneer limits them to 4X in their official firmware. NEC's drives have been reported to have problems with some batches of RitekG04 -R media, while Pioneer's drive seems to burn them without any issues.So I reiterate.. performance should cover a whole lot of other parameters,besides the ones defined by the chipset.
Oh,Ian, this is bhairavp from CDRLabs.
KristopherKubicki - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - link
Its OK. The similarities i claimed though were in performance, not features. The operative word is similar also. So yes, in some instances it would be like saying motherboard and and motherboard b perform similarly because they have the same chipset.When it comes down to it, if the Memorex, ASUS and Pioneer drives are all very similar (well actually identical), wouldnt you just want the cheapest?
Kristopher
Ian@CDRlabs - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - link
Sorry Kristopher, I didn't get your email. Send it again.Just to be nitpicky, there are differences between the 2500A and DDW8800, at least cosmetic. The AOpen is missing a head phone jack. The MSI and Sony drives also have their differences. In particular, the Sony is lacking HD-Burn support.
While those are good examples of companies using the same OEM, I wouldn't say that the Gigabyte (OEM BTC?) performs like the Lite-On 812S just because they have the same chipset. That's like saying this and this motherboard perform the same because they have the same Intel chipset. You Anandtech guys should be able to relate to that.
arswihart - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - link
Can somebody tell me what bit setting is and why I should care about it? ThanksKristopherKubicki - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - link
Ian i sent you an email the other day and you never responded ;)There is 0 difference between the NEC2500A and the AOpen DDW8800. Same with the MSI and Sony, and the ASUS and Pioneer. They just use the same OEM so all the components are identical. Manufacturers get really upset when you say stuff like that, but its the truth.
Kristopher
Ian@CDRlabs - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - link
You might want to try KProbe2. It now has separate PI/PO settings.I was a little surprised by the "would expect similar performance" comments. While some of drives use the same chipset, there are a lot of other differences (Ex: firmware, pickups, etc) that effect performance.
Also, when are you going to start including writing times to go along with the average writing speeds? IMO, this isn't the way to show which drive is "fastest".
KristopherKubicki - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - link
#6: I heard otherwise about using the DDW-061 to DDW-081 utility on the DDW-082 and bumping your 8X burns to 10X. I havent tried it though thats something i will look at after finals maybe.Kristopher
Booty - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - link
'didja *read* the article??'Nope, sure didn't... I skip through parts of most AT articles because they either get too wordy or I just don't have time to read them thoroughly. In those cases, I skip to the conclusion for a summary. My bad.
CrazeeHorse - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - link
Number 2 : You can download the B372 firmware from www.rpc1.orgNumber 4 : Nopes.. you're outta luck.
Mr Kubicki.. Why didn't you test KProbe @ 4X/8ECC as is being used @ CDFreaks and CDRLabs? The original scanning PI/PO specs call for 1X/1ECC scanning, so Max/1ECC is not going to give you correct results.
ALso, there is NO hack for making the Nu081 burn at 10X, and their bitsetting utility is perfect. The disc is recognised as DVD-ROM by all the DVDROM drives I've tried, so it seems to work just fine;)
l3ored - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - link
the nutech and toshiba error charts dont come up