detail information

Reading performance:

For these tests we will use Nero CD/DVD-Speed to read various CD and DVD's, including audio discs and DVD-media. As already mentioned in the introduction, this drive sports a specified read speed of 16X for DVD's and 48X for CD's.

Pressed discs:

For this test we used a pressed CD-ROM disc containing PlexTools v1.08 that is exactly 74 minutes long. Below you will see the produced result:

The BenQ DW1640 did almost reach 48x. To see how this compares to other drives, look below:

Among the faster drives and average seek times.

CD-Recordable Discs:

For this test we made a copy of the original PlexTools v1.08 CD. The disc we used was a Verbatim 48X certified CD-R disc manufactured by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation.

No big differences compared to reading the original pressed disc, but let us compare the result to some other drives:

It was able to beat all the other drives, but the difference is rather small. But it looks like it has a problem with seek times on the CD-R discs.

CD-ReWritable discs:

Again we made a copy of the original PlexTools v1.08 disc, this time we used a Verbatim High Speed (10X) CD-RW disc made by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation.

The drive reads CD-RW discs at 40x speed. Check how this compares to other drives below.

Among the faster drives, but we would still like to see 48x reading like the AOpen drive. Seek times is better again, although not perfect.

Audio - Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the digital audio extraction performance of the BenQ DW1640, we again used Nero CD/DVD-Speed to measure the transfer rate. The audio disc we used is slightly larger than the disc used for the other tests, to be exact it's about 78 minutes long (77:56:57).

The drive had no problems with reading the audio disc at full speed; let us compare the result with other drives:

Among the faster drives, but there is again some seek time issues.

Advanced audio - DAE quality test:

Before we move on to testing DVD read speeds, we will take a last audio test. This time we used the 'Advanced DAE Quality Test" feature in CD-Speed.

The extracting quality should be excellent, but it doesn't support reading data from the lead-out. This could affect the ability to extract audio from certain protected audio discs. The test claims that it's too slow for 12x and 16x on the fly copying, this is not correct.

DVD reading performance:

Again, we will use Nero CD-Speed to measure the reading performance, this time for various types of DVD discs. The drive should read pressed single layer DVD-discs at 16X.

DVD - DVD-Video:

For our DVD reading performance tests we are going to start with single and dual layered DVD video discs. While only 1X speed is required to watch DVD movies, it's useful to be able to read the discs at higher speeds if you're going to extract (rip) the content of the disc to your hard drive.

This drive has no riplock and does nearly reach 16x with the single layer disc. The double layer disc is only read at 12x.

Very good, since it's the only drive to read dual layer at 12x it outperforms all the other drives easily.

 DVD+R/RW:

For this test we used a Taiyo Yuden 4X DVD+R and a Ricoh 4X DVD+RW with about 4,4Gb of data. Below are the results:

No complaints at all, they finally unlocked the full potential and the drive reads the DVD+R disc at 16x speed and the DVD+RW disc at 12x speed.

Well, it simply outperformed all the other drives, and we have no complaints.

DVD - DVD-R/RW:

For this test we used a Taiyo Yuden 4X DVD-R disc and a Verbatim 2X DVD-RW disc filled with about 4.4Gb of data. Our test results are found below:

There are hardly any differences compared to reading the DVD+R/RW discs.

Again able to outperform all the other drives, this is a plus in our book.

Overall thoughts:

Very fast and stable reader which outperforms most other drives. But the seek times are sometimes a bit high.

But now it's time to head on to a more interesting part: Writing CD-R and CD-RW discs…