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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stoctrash who wrote (26915)	12/19/1997 1:45:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

Pacific Digital 2X DVD-ROM Upgrade Kit PROS: Fast DVD-ROM. CONS: Problems with some graphics cards. Pacific Digital's easy-to-install 2X DVD-ROM kit improves on the performance of Diamond's single-speed drive. COMPANY: Pacific Digital, Irvine, CA Price:$379 Availability:: Now OS SUPPORT: Win 95 Phone: 714-252-1111 URL: www.pacificdigitalcorp.com You know how CD-ROM manufacturers have raced to place 2X, 8X, 16X, and so forth, on their drives? DVD-ROM vendors have caught the fever. The heart of the Pacific Digital's 2X DVD-ROM Upgrade Kit is Hitachi's new GD-2000 DVD-ROM player, a second-generation device that speeds up DVD-ROM throughput and can even read CD-Rs. The company claims 2X DVD-ROM speed and 20X CD-ROM speed. We tested a shipping unit, which while 14% faster than the 1X Diamond Maximum DVD kit (see "Diamond's So-So DVD Upgrade Kit," My Computer, October 1997), doesn't really double performance. We installed the kit by simply plugging in the MPEG decoder card and the drive and loading the sound card driver. Unlike Diamond's upgrade kit, this DVD-ROM drive didn't use a video passthrough. This isn't the greatest solution for graphics cards, like those from Matrox, that expect video overlay to be handled differently than the way the Pacific Digital decoder card works. However, your motherboard may make more of a difference than the graphics card. For example, we tested the kit on a 200-MHz Pentium Pro Quantex system with a Matrox Mystique and experienced slow playback. However, movies played correctly on a 200-MHz MMX Dell XPS Pro 200n, which also uses a Matrox Mystique. Pacific Digital says it is working on the problem. Copying a 30MB file from CD to our Quantex hard disk averaged approximately 18 seconds with the Pacific Digital Kit. Diamond's drive averaged 28 seconds. A 54.4MB DVD file averaged 37 seconds, compared with 43 seconds for the Diamond. The Pacific Digital also had no difficulty reading CD-Rs. You'll be happy you waited for the Pacific Digital DVD-ROM Kit.