ByronT 0 Posted February 17, 2000 I'm not asking for help in getting one working (yet!) Rather, I'm asking for opinions on performance/price of drives that are available. I currently have 3 SCSI CD-ROMs: Plextor 12X, Ultra 40X, and 8/20X CDR drives. If it is at all possible, I would like to stick with a SCSI chain, but I am open to installing a EIDE drive. I have pretty much whittled the choices down to the new Creative 8X DVD kit, and the Pioneer 6X drive. With my V770 Ultra adapter, do I really need an MPEG decoder card (and which ones are supposed to work?) Or should I just go with the Creative kit (in other words, is the Creative decoder any good?) Oh yeah, throw into the mix my Diamond MX300 sound card - which I will probably replace with an SBLive when LiveWare 4.x for Win2K comes out. Thanks for the info. ------------------ J. Byron Todd Computer Consultant byron@toddcomp.com Todd Computer Solutions Share this post Link to post
YuppieScum 0 Posted February 18, 2000 Only go with an IDE drive if there will only be one device on the channel and you have a spare IRQ... A decoder card will reduce CPU load, but wait a month to find out which will be supported... Share this post Link to post
DarkOne 0 Posted February 18, 2000 My creative 5x kit works great in 2k all you have to do is use the WDM drivers for the DXR2. BUT I am not sure about the one that comes with the 8x kit, dxr3? If you Video Card has tvout there really is no reason for a decoder card, unless you want the 5.1 sound out that is found on some cards. Share this post Link to post
EddiE314 0 Posted February 18, 2000 If you're looking for prices ByronT, go to www.pricewatch.com thats where I go to get RAM and stuff, they have dvd drives there, great prices too. I think you can get a generic 5x for $50. Share this post Link to post
5t3ph3n 0 Posted February 18, 2000 I recently bought (1 month ago) the EIDE Hitachi GD2500BX nainly for 3 reasons: 1. astonishing audio extraction (>11kb/s) so you can do on-the-fly recording even with a 8x cd-r 2. region unlocked (watch that out since now very few drives are still hardware unlocked) 3. releatively slow price - the dvd picture with powerdvd 2.5 was acceptable even with my TNT1 card but i wanted tv-out so i also bought Real Magic Hollywood+ decoder because of what i saw on this site about drivers support in Win2k. After all, you can buy first the dvd drive and if you're not satisfied with the picture (i believe you will be) go for the decoder card. [This message has been edited by 5t3ph3n (edited 18 February 2000).] Share this post Link to post
