Over the past few years DVD burning has moved forward, faster some would say than CD burning did in its infancy.  We have gone from a few hundred dollars for a 1X DVD burner just about two years ago, to between one and two hundred for an 8X DVD +/- burner.  However the main sore point during the start of DVD burning era was which format to use, as there was + adopted by companies such as HP, and then there was - which was adopted by the MPC.

    This lead to questions that are still asked today, such as which format is more compatible, + or -?  We will look at this question during our review by testing the disks on a couple of different players.  The format war will never really end it seems so we can but give the facts about the different drives.

    ASUS has moved onto other technological areas besides their motherboard business, with video cards, burners, Pocket PC's, and laptops also in their portfolio.  Having released only one DVD burner previous to their latest, one may wonder if ASUS will have the same quality that their motherboards do.

ASUS DRW-0804P

    ASUS has a reputation to uphold with their products, so does this drive offer a quality package or does it provide a more basic packaging.  Lets take a look at the drive, and if you wan to take a look at the drives specifications, .

    Here's the contents of the box:

• The Drive
• Manual
• Nero Burning ROM
• IDE cable
• Eject Pin
• Audio cable

    So taking a look at the drive we see that it is a fairly standard IDE optical drive.  The contents of the package include one of my favorite burning programs Ahead Nero version 6.  A nice touch that ASUS included was the emergency eject pin, which can save you time if you manage to get a disk stuck in the drive.  The one main thing that this package is missing is disks, either a +/- R or RW would be nice, as 8X disks are fairly rare in Canada still.

    The software itself is a decent looking program though it isn't the full Nero version.  Rather it is Nero Express version 6, though it comes with many of the features of the full Nero program.   What you loose is the main Nero Explorer window, as well as some of the other newer features Ahead has added.  Some of these are a MPEG-2 encoder, backup program, and video capture program.  

    The above images show what you have to work with, either starting with the Smart Start program or the actual Nero Express program.  Smart Start is just a facade that takes you to Nero Express when you pick your task.  While I would have preferred the full program, this is almost as good as the full version, with just some things missing.

    However the software isn't what is primary in the package, its the drive.  With this drive the big thing is that it is a 8X +/-R writing and the 4X +/-RW writing.  So lets see how the drive did compared to two other DVD writers.

Benchmark System

CD Reading/Writing Tests

    First we will look at the most basic uses of these drives, as regular CD readers and also as writers.  Lets see how they do.

ASUS DRW-0804P	Pioneer DVR-105	LG GMA-4020B

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