Newbies pls see this - cheapy media is BAD.....

It looks like I'm having my usual luck of buying DVDs. This time I got some Ritek G05 which I usually have good luck with. These discs were burned on 2 different burners, the first on a Benq 1620 and the second on an LG GSA-4163B. You can see blemishes on both discs and a ring on one I finally burned it on a TY which I've also found problems with lately and it came out good. It looks like quality control has gone completely to shit.




Nero CD/DVD speed disc quality couldn't read the second disc completely. These both have the same movie on them.

Dave

 

They used to like most anything except Optodisc or Leaddata. It seems that what I can be most sure of is Verbatim. My Pioneer and Lite-On don't appear to like TY very much. None of them appear to like Ritek which I used to have very good luck with. I figure that's probably due to the blemishes I keep finding. It seems that whatever I buy that seems good isn't the next time I buy it. Surely I don't have 4 bad burners. I guess I'll keep stumbling along untill I find something that all of my burners like. Right now, Verbatim appears to be the closest.

Dave

 

@ Matt 72

Tips on the perfect P.C. you were asking about from a guy who has built thousands over the last 12 years.

1) No store bough P.C. will ever suffice
2) If you want the best, do your homework and have a system builder build custom for you.
3) Go AMD instead of Intel. Less expensive hardware that generally outperforms Intel processors in "Real World Tests" not benchmarks from programs that put out lines and graphs you will never use but real programs and games you want to run
4) Recommendations in order of importance to get the most speed from your P.C. :

a) Put as much money into the disk system as possible above all other things. If you can afford a high end motherboard like the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard you will get RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) capability which in my opinion is one of the most important things to spend your hard earned cash on. Why? Because you can buy two 75 GB Western Digital Raptor hard drives running at 10,000 RPMs (instead of standard 7200 or worse 5400 RPMs) and run them in a RAID 0 array where the two are paired together to act as one single 150 GB drive (- formatting overhead so it wont read exactly 150 when looking at in Windows). The benefit is that instead of one drive writing and reading with a maximum throughput of 150 MB per second you are actually writing part data to one drive at the exact same time part data is writing to the other drive so the combined best throughput rate is doubled (300 MB per second). Since any chip beyond 3 Gigahertz has awesome capacity these days and RAM is dirt cheap (recommend at least a Gigabyte of it if you can afford), the single worst slow point in a machine is the disk subsystem. Any large improvements here translate to VISIBLE performance gains. I went from an AMD 3500 to the 939 3700 which is a neglible, virtually invisible to the eye 200 Mhz difference in real world use, stayed with the exact same Kingston Hyper X 1 GB of RAM but the addition of the Raptor RAID array was huge. It took me 5 minutes to format the ARRAY, and load Windows XP Pro (which I don't necessarily recommend over Home Edition if you are a gamer). This is down from 12 minutes under the prior config which had a single 250 GB WD 7200 RPM drive. Anyway, the mainboard I mentioned has 8 channel surround but I still recommend the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy ZS series if you can afford. If you go with the pro version it comes with an external box that connects up to every device known to man through every type of input ever made (not really but close) and the sound is awesome.

b) Video cards: This is the most subjective piece of equipment in the machine based on what you are likely to use the most. If you are a gamer you do want to spend the bucks even if not right away and get a high end gaming card. Years ago I purchased the top of the line Guillemot/Hercules 64 Prophet Ultra series and paid over $500 for it. It has served me so well through the years and countless mainboard/cpu upgrades I can't even tell you about them all. It was/is so good still that I finally was forced through the purchase of the mainboard mentioned above to buy a new high end video card and got the PCI Express (the mainboard requires it NO AGP in this box) EVGA 7800 GTX video card with 256 MB RAM. It was so long since I have upgraded the video and so much technology has changed that I was expecting something truly great to happen to my 19" LCD monitor while running DOOM 3, Far Cry, and Battlefied 2 that came with the video card - and guess what - no big deal. $619 later (now much less even a few weeks later I have seen it for almost $100 cheaper) I am no more visually stunned with the playback or color quality or anything else while playing these games. This is not to say anything negative toward the new EVGA card, but rather (I hope) a testament to how great the old high end graphics card was. Basically this is not a component that once chosen needs to be replaced like socks if you choose well to begin with. That is the point I am trying to make. As far as whether or not the EVGA 7800 GTX is the single best video card on the market today, I must withhold judgement until I have had it longer, built with other comparable cards, listened to others comments, etc. But any high end gaming card is huge if you want to play games and see them in all the splendor some possess.

If you are not a gamer but want your system to double as a T.V. or some other operation then ATI all in wonder cards are solid performing cards that are well supported for such endeavors. They can do T.V. capture, video capture, and more because they come with the software to do these things along with the hardware out of the box.

c) Do NOT shoot the wad on the fastest CPU known to man. This is "fools money". If you spend the money on all the other things I mentioned first, you probably (unless independently wealthy) won't have much left anyway. A simple AMD 3000 or above will suffice at this level- trust me. If you have all these other parts, no software in existence game or otherwise will even dent the performance of this machine. The motherboard mentioned above supports the new X2 series of processors from AMD which have dual cores or two mini cpus on one dye so they are truly capable of multi-threading (running many program threads from the same program simultaneously rather than in a speculative order which takes longer). This will not benefit gamers today as no games truly make use of multi-threading in its true form, but will start in generations to come. It will make a huge difference if you like to run about 7 windows simultaneously as I do in the course of a business day. They each can open and close with the same lightning fast response that the first window launch did. (Or so I hear) as I did not opt to spend $800+ for this chip. The point here is that I have that major upgrade in my future once those chips drop in price substantially in months to come. If you start with such a mainboard the world is your oyster in terms of upgrades. If you start with a cheaper mainboard, not only are your upgrade options minimized, but you must often go through much pain, aggrivation, and possible data loss trying to upgrade later because the degree of upgrades is much more severe. Like replacing the whole mainboard for the new thing you want to do instead of dropping in a new chip. Then reloading windows because XP won't boot with your new config since it is looking for drivers to hardware that no longer exists in the new build. You can see the benefit to mapping out your upgrade path now instead of later...

D) High performance memory is nice, but in my experience less beneficial than having the sum of all the other parts first. If you still have money to burn after all of the above, then by all means purchase DUAL CHANNEL DDRAM which allows read/writes to function together at the memory level just as I explained can happen at the hard drive level with RAID arrays. This would be memory that comes in pairs and only two of the four RAM banks on the above mentioned board run with this benefit so please consider carefully how much RAM you want to start with. No sense buying two 256 MB chips of DUAL CHANNEL RAM today only to put them senselessly in the latter channel banks when you upgrade to two 512 MB DUAL CHANNEL DIMMS because you find out later that you need a GB or more of RAM for the games you want to run at high resolution.

E) Media drives: I.E. Plextor is best. After years of building machines with sony, philips, panasonic, lite-on, samsung, (the list goes on endlessly) I can tell you one thing - Plextor is best. They are such a solid performing drive that in years of building with them I have NEVER had one come back to the shop, NEVER had a customer complaint against them, and have NEVER been disappointed by their performance through the years. There are rare components by any given vendor I can say this about but Plextor is one.

F) Power Supplies: Though I mentioned these tips would be in order of importance this tip is the exception to the rule. Don't buy a Lamborghini and feed it cheap gas... Don't buy a high performance computer and expect it to run on a cheap no name power supply that claims to do 600 Watts. Power supply vendors are unregulated in many of their claims and many companies will rate their power supplies based on Peak power outputs they cannot sustain for any length of time. Kind of like saying your car can do 120 because you once went 120 M.P.H. on a downhill slope in hurricane with the wind at your back. I can honestly tell you that only a few companies rate their psus by TRUE power output and ANTEC is one of them. I purchased all the equipment mentioned at various points in this dissertation and tried to run it with a 550 Watt psu from the case manufacturer I chose (Thermaltake Xaser - just liked the way it looked, how large it was because I could liquid cool it, and loved the solid construction though you need to be a beefy dude to pack this thing to a LAN party cause it weighs close to 70 lbs without any hardware in it). Though Thermaltake is highly regarded in many cases, I can tell you that their manufacturer supplied psu at 550 Watts should have been more than enough for the hardware that I put in the case but the unit wouldn't even boot for me after I added the new stuff. So I purchased the Antec and paid a hefty tag for it. A 480 Watt rated unit by the way (70 Watts less than the supposedly 550 Watt rated psu and guess what) nothing but blue skies baby. The things runs like a champ. Another nice but unrequested feature that simply comes with a high end PSU like this one is that the power plugs are all modular, meaning you plug one end into the psu mounted in the case and the other end into your hard drives, cd drives, mainboard, etc. This allows you to only clutter the case with the necessary amount of power plugs saving on cooling requirements because you get better air flow and it looks cleaner if you purchase a see through side panel case.

G) Cases are like socks. Choose ones that fit the size of your foot (number of drives, cooling aspirations, etc) , feel good (fit your desk space without crushing a small pet if it should fall through your desk because it weighs 100 lbs configured), and look nice (see through, glow in the dark, black, white, two-tone etc). Just one tip here, cheap cases are usually very thin and hence very weak and easy to dent, tweak out of shape, etc. plus they often have sharp edges that cut the P.C. novice who is in their for the occasional upgrade and most often come with inferior power supplies that you will want to either toss in the trash upon receiving or sell at a yard sale.

H) Operating System- If you have been sold on the configuration above by now then you are looking seriously at a 64 bit capable platform. You can get a free 180 evaluation of Windows XP 64 Bit right now from Microsoft.com BUT beware of limited driver support at this point. With the above config, I tried to load it myself and found a host of problems with buggy drivers that claimed to be 64 bit or programs which I really liked that simply did Not like the new OS. Though you have the hardware to run it, you may want to wait until many of these issues are overcome by checking the sites of the vendors whose products you are most interested in using internally for your new build to see when they are out with truly stable 64 bit stuff and more programs have been 64 bit optimized. Though vendors like to claim backward compatibility in the real world it just isn't always so.

Anyway I hope this quick note become small novel helps to aid you and other P.C. enthusiasts in choosing hardware for a truly divine machine with a problem free life span.

 

Matt 72 requested information and recommendations on a new system in his post; hence the @Matt 72.

 

Hey there, looking for some info on my media (as google seems to split opinions)

[bold]Discs printed as:-[/bold]

Datawrite (Grey) 8X

[bold]DvdIdentifier gives media info as:-[/bold]

Prodisc Technology Inc
ProdiscF01

[bold]Burner used is:-[/bold]
Lite-On DVDRW SOHW-1673S (FW JS02)

Having used over 150 of these discs, all purchased in batches of 50 at different times at the same independent store, i have only gotten 3 coasters. Only one of which was down to the media (eemed like the dye ran) the other 2 were my own fault stupidly pressing keys when burning.

Most of these discs were burned at 8X (yeah, im impatient...so) and have no playback problems in several machines (PC DVD and standalone, including some name branded players such as Sony & Denon)

[bold]My Machine specs are:-[/bold]

Asus A7N8X-X
Athlon 2500
512MB (PC3200)
Maxtor Diamondmax 10 (80G) (Primary)
Samsung spinpoint 120 (120G) (Secondary)
Lite-On DVDRW SOHW-1673S (Primary)
Lite-On DVDRW SOHW-1673S (Secondary)
Cmedia 18738/3CDX
Aopen GF4000 8X AGP (TV OUT)
Tevion TV Capture TV7134

Using a mixture of DvdShrink, DivX to DVD, Etc for creating the files for burning and Nero 6.6.13 for the actual burning. This included copying a DVD using Nero (on the fly) with no problems)

so I seem to be breaking all the rules and still not having a problem.

I did a test by burning as much to one of these discs as i could (made a bunch of 5mg files and put them all on the disc till it was over capacity and took a few off one by one till they "just" fit and burned it at 8X then i left the disc in the sun, out of a sleeve etc and generally treated it badly. (not gonna do this with my rips but for test purposes..ok) After a week of the disc being left in these conditions i then compared the files on the disc to the ones still on my PC. There was no change in them, they transferred back to my PC no trouble at all.

So, I seem to only have positive stories about this media (which CDMedia World Classes as second rate media, about 85-95% success) and yet have heard people say that prodisc media is terrible and should never be used!

How much stock am I to hold in other peoples stories and how much in my own experience?

Any Input (apart of course from folks calling me foolish for my 8X burning practices and 512MB of RAM, yes I know its "not enough" but again I never have a problem with that and NO my buffers dont run like madness all in all my burn processes are pretty damn stable even if I`m surfing or listening to mp3`s as well) would be appreciated just as a matter of interest.

(Am I the exception that proves the rule?)

EthrielTD

 

I've had pretty good luch with Prodisc in the past. I've used some Fuji printables that were Prodisc F01. As long as I stick to the 8X -R Prodisc I've had fair results. The +R are crap, at least in my burners. I found some 16X -Rs that didn't seem to be so good either. They were Prodisc F02. They work OK if they are burned at 4X or 6X but why pay extra for 16X to burn them at 4X. Most of my Prodisc have coded as MCC 02RG20, the same as 8X -R Verbatim. Although they code the same they don't seem to be the same quality as the Verbatims. I usually don't get as good a Kprobe scan with them as the Verbatims. But for the price they are OK, I guess. What I've really had bad luck with lately is some Ritek G05 8X -R. If I burn them any faster than 4X or 6X at the max, I get rings and splotches on the disc and they usually won't play without locking up. Apparently, the higher heat of the laser at 8X melts the dye. I have 4 different burners, all different brands, so I don't think it's a burner problem. This happens with all of them. I beleive that quality control has just gone to shit. I've been using some 16X -/+R Verbatims that I get at Sam's Club for a decent price that I can burn at full speed if I want to, although I generally stick to 12X. They have + & - for the same price. I can't decide which one I like the best. Each has their advantages.

Dave

 

hehe...seems that the "dolphin guy" from canada is pretty well versed on Taiyo Yuden...do you see a certain similarity between him and i, creaky? LOL

 

i believe he's on page 14...but, we are not "close" blood is thicker than water, so i can't deny the fact of kinship. hehe

 

LOL, the PI graph is quite dark creaky~ hahaha...i don't think i see even a speck of white to it~ and with the PIF graph, looks like Loch Ness is coming out of the water in the beginning and slowly going back into the water towards the end~