Artec 52X 24X 52X CDRW Series

The Artec 52X 24X 52X CD-RW Series
The drive is on fire, we don't need no water, let that baby burn!

By Tom Laverriere
June 24, 2003

Installing this new 52X CD-RW drive from Artec is straightforward as are all similar 5 1/4" drives.  Find yourself an empty 5 1/4" bay in your case, mount it and connect the cables using the provided hardware and cable kit and you'll be off ripping and burning in no time.

The Artec 52X 24X 52X Bundled Software Getting Ahead with Nero

Artec ships its CD-RW drive with probably the most popular title pertaining to this technology, Ahead's Nero Express Burning ROM.  Nero will handle most all of your requirements, for this drive since it does everything including burning, ripping, and copying.  It is nice to see such a robust piece of software ship with this drive and it happens to be the program of choice over here at the HotHardware labs when it comes to using these multifunction drives.

Nero's Express CD Creator
 
             

The three screen shots above show just how user friendly Nero Express can be.  It's a matter of simply clicking the option you want, whether it be burning a data or a music CD or doing a disc-to-disc copy, and following the step-by-step instructions.  The middle screen shot shows the beginning of a disc-to-disc copy.  Notice how Nero automatically detects the drive's 52X ( 7800 KB/s ) recording capabilities.  The last screen shot in the group shows the data copy portion of Nero Express.  It's a matter of doing a little browsing and selecting the files you want to be copied to disc.  It doesn't get much more simplified than this and will make every burning endeavor a quick and easy one.

Nero Express Label Maker
 
          

Nero Express doesn't just allow you to burn CD's.  It comes with a nifty label maker that allows the user to create custom CD labels for that huge collection that you'll be piling up.  Whether it be some custom images you cooked up or images you grabbed from somewhere else, paste them onto your CD label or cover and your CD's are styling.  So now that we've seen just how robust Nero Express can be, let's put it to some good use and get some numbers from Artec's 52X burning machine!

HotHardware Test System Powered by AMD

CD-ROM Performance Tests - Plextor PX-W4824TA Stop! NERO Time!

Nero InfoTool

For the remainder of the review we will be featuring the Artec 52X burner in a head to head comparison with another burner we've reviewed in the HotHarware labs, MSI's 52X burner.  Ahead's Nero Info Tool gives us a report on the features and capabilities of the Artec drive.  The biggest differences between the two drives are the writing modes.  The most notable feature absent from the MSI CD-RW drive that is supported by the Artec burner is Mount Rainer support.  Mount Rainer capabilities allow a CD-RW disc to be formatted in a way that will allow the user to drag and drop files on and off of the disc.  In other words, it acts very similar to your hard drive.  This is an extremely useful feature and one we'd like to see standard in all CD-RW drives.

SiSoft SANDRA:

Our first test of the bunch is the CD/DVD File System benchmark from Sandra.  For this test we used a retail Quake 3 CD.  The MSI 52X burner manages a better score ( 2561 KB/s ) compared to the Artec drive ( 2107 KB/s ).  The MSI drive seems to be a little bit quicker as a standard reader, in this test.

Nero CD Speed - Data:

For our next test we have used Nero's CD Speed test using the same retail Quake 3 CD.  The Artec and MSI drives are pretty much neck and neck in this test.  While the Artec burner managed some quicker seek times, its competitor had a higher average read speed ( 33.68x compared to 32.79x ).  Given that these differences are extremely minute, we'd have to say that they're within the margin of error for this test and we will conclude that the Artec and MSI drives performed nearly identical in this test.  Next up, we're going to use Nero CD Speed again to see the performance of each drive with an audio CD.

More Nero CD Speed, MP3 Encoding, And Full Disc Buring