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Performance
The acid test -
what can this thing do? Well as I said your present CD-ROM
is probably faster than the Trimaxx for reading data, so I've not
investigated that aspect of the combo's performance. If you
want to watch DVD films on your PC you'll need to install a
decoder first - I use PowerDVD but there are plenty of similar
products around and I'm not really in a position to say which one
is the best. Anyway here's a screenshot from the Trimaxx:
No prizes for
guessing the film title I'm afraid. Watching on your PC with
a software decoder
means that you're reliant on CPU power for smooth
playback; a better alternative is obviously a hardware decoder.
However the Celerons in my system seem to have no problem with
PowerDVD.
The Hercules
Prophet II GTS has a TV output, but I haven't yet hooked this up
to my TV. I'll let you know the results when I do, but I'm
predicting that DVD through the Prophet to a widescreen TV with a
link into my hi-fi for the sound will be the way to watch a
film.
How about CD
writing? Using the Trimaxx with Nero software provides easy
and (so far) coaster free reproduction. To give you an idea
of the sort of real world figures 6 speed writing translates into
I copied a CD containing 622MB of mixed file types onto a CD-R.
The whole process took 19 minutes and 15 seconds, which seems
pretty reasonable to me. Copying 292MB of audio tracks took
15 minutes 23 seconds.
This is an ideal
way of backing up valuable data,
particularly if you are a hardcore tweaker - playing around with
the limits of your PC inevitably means you're going to screw up
from time to time, and it's reassuring to know that the project
you've been working on for so long is safely stored on a piece of
removable media rather than cowering on one of your hard drive
partitions, just waiting to be corrupted.
Although
the Trimaxx doesn't employ burn-proof technology (a process that
suspends the CD burning when the data buffers are near empty;
without this if the buffer runs dry the drive keeps trying to
write to the disk and crunch - you've just made a coaster) it does
have a 2MB buffer, which seems to be sufficient for the job.
It will write a disk and crunch a SETI unit on each CPU at the
same time anyhow.
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