detail information

Pioneer Europe was kind enough to send us their latest DVD-Writer; The Pioneer DVR-107D. This writer is a much anticipated drive and our expectations are very high. In this review we will run the drive through several advanced tests, and try to test as many aspects as possible.

We will also thank our contact persons at Pioneer Europe for being very nice and helpful. Whenever we had any questions they were always very helpful, thanks.

Also thanks to Memorex for providing some of the media used in this review.

Some short Pioneer information:

Pioneer is a large and well-known company over the whole world and has since the 1930s been providing quality products, so let us take a look at their product history:

As we can see they have been providing high tech, quality products for a long time. Pioneer, as we know them now, has the following vision:

sound.vision.soul

Pioneer group's sense of purpose

Everyone's got soul. The never-ending challenge is to find better ways to feel it deeper down inside. At Pioneer, 'Move the Heart and Touch the Soul" means more than words can express. It's our mission to stir as many senses and sensibilities as we can through the wonders of everlasting sound and vision.

Since we are pretty sure that almost everyone knows Pioneer, we do not think a longer company presentation is needed and go directly to drive specifications.

Drive specifications:

These are the specifications of this drive, found at the Pioneer Europe web page:

Specification-wise it seems like a very good drive, the only drawback seems to be that the CD-R Write speed is only 24x compared to 40x for most competitors.

In this review we will try to find out how good it really performs by taking it through several extensive tests.

Test machine:

For this review we will be using a computer with the following configuration:

Hardware:

⋅         Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-8KNXP with Intel i875P chipset.
⋅         Processor: Intel Pentium 4 2,8GHz 800MHz FSB with Hyper Threading support.
⋅         RAM: 1Gb PC3500 DDR
⋅         GFX: ATI Radeon 9800 pro
⋅         Sound: SB Audigy 2
⋅         Hard disks: 2 x Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80Gb in RAID 0 on the i875P S-ATA RAID controller.

System set-up:

The Pioneer DVR-107D was connected as Secondary Master and identified itself as PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-107D. DMA (Direct Memory Access) and autorun was enabled for all devices.

Software:

Windows XP professional is installed on the computer along with Service Pack 1 for windows XP. We will be using the following software in this review:

⋅         Ahead InCD v 4.1.5.7
⋅         Ahead Nero Burning ROM version 6.3.0.3
⋅         Ahead Nero CD/DVD Speed v2.11.4
⋅         Ahead Nero InfoTool v2.07
⋅         Slysoft CloneCD v4.3.1.9
⋅         Exact Audio Copy v0.95 prebeta 3
⋅         K-Probe v1.1.28/1.1.29

Head on to the next page and find out what's inside the box…