If there's one area that consumers have plenty of products to choose from, it's CD burners. Most often, buyers simply go with the fastest burner they can afford. We can't really argue this mentality, since let's face it, most drives aren't all that unique. Take BURN-Proof protection. What was once exclusive to a handful of drives, it's included in pretty much every drive under the sun.

Manufacturers have the problem of separating themselves from one another. Since BURN-Proof is everywhere, they started moving up the drive speeds. Thing is, at 52x, drives are getting pretty much as fast as they are going to get.

MSI's latest CR52-M CD burner doesn't change the formula too much from their previous burner (the CR52-A2). There are a few notable upgrades, namely the jump from 24x CDRW to 32x, which we'll look at today.

Specifications

• 52x CD-R writing / 32x CD-RW rewriting / 52x CD-ROM reading
• SuperLink™ prevents buffer under run and minimizes recording failures
• Supported Mount Rainier technology
• Supported over-burn feature
• Supported 99 (870MB) or 90min (800MB) CD-R disc
• Supported 8cm or 12cm disc diameter
• 2MB internal buffer
• Firmware upgradeable
• Enhanced IDE/ATAPI interface
• PIO Mode 4, DMA Mode 2 and UDMA Mode 2
• Horizontal and vertical operation
• Supported optimum power control
• Supported CD-R write speed at 2x, 4x, 8x, 12x, 16x, 20x, 24x, 32x, 40x, 48x and 52x
• Supported CD-RW write speed at 2x, 4x, 6x, 8x, 10x, 12x, 16x, 20x, 24x and 32x
• CD-UDF compatible
• Writing Modes: Disc-at-Once, Track-at-Once, Session-at-Once, Multi-session, Packet Writing, RAW Mode

The drive itself is a standard 5.25" CD ROM drive, though with MiniForm, it is slightly shorter than the majority of drives on the market. For SFFs, such as the MEGA 651, a shorter drive will make life much easier when installing, and restrict less airflow. Speaking of SFFs, a lot of people like to use these for HTPCs, so less noise is better. SoftBurn is a feature that reduces noise while burning a CD.

We received an early sample, which explains why you see 52x24x52x on the front faceplate. The drive label says otherwise, and indicates the correct model number.

On the right side of the drive, you'll find your track forward button (for skipping tracks on a music CD), and the eject button. These buttons do serve additional functions though, which we'll get into in a moment.

If you plan on listening to standard music CDs, there is headphone jack and volume control on the left side of the drive. You also have a pin hole to manually eject a disc if the eject button doesn't work, or if you forget to remove the disc before powering down the PC.

On the back, you have your IDE connection, your audio cable connection (cable is included), jumper settings and the power connection. Note that an IDE cable is not included. This has been the case with all MSI CD burners. I'm sure a lot of you have extra IDE cables, but I don't think it would have been a big deal to add one to the package.

Following Plextor's lead, the inside tray is coloured black. Though I have yet to see any hard evidence, but the theory behind it is a black tray absorbs reflected light better than a standard beige or white tray. This increases reliability of the burn process.

Features of Note

As we already mentioned, the drive is a 52x32x52x. Now, high spinning discs could be problematic as some drives have been known to literally blow apart at these speeds. I didn't blow up the CR52-M, and this was after enabling 52x reading, but who is to say it won't happen? In that case, MSI has reinforced the drive with HyperGuard, which is a safety measure to protect your delicate body parts from a CD exploding.

By default, the drive reads at 40x, but by pressing the eject button for 3 seconds, you enable 52x read speed. The drive reverts to 40x once the disc is ejected. The eject button also lights up blue when a disc is inserted, so you won't need to eject to see if there's a disc in there.

Reading	Writing

Looking closer at the LED buttons, another neat feature is the skip track button flashes blue while the drive is reading data, and the same button flashes green while drive is writing data. Now, I would imagine 99% of you know what your drive is doing at any given moment. However, in the cases where you've educated family members, they'll know not to eject a disc if they borrow your computer to play a music CD while you're burning.

Media support is typical of most drives, but one thing that did catch my attention was support for 99 minute CDs (870MB). Though I don't have any of these discs handy, if you like to pirate backup any DVDs to VCD, this will be useful since most movies tend to end at about the 90 minute mark.

There is a 2MB buffer, which is a tad on the small side of things, but the CR52-M does offer SuperLink buffer under run protection. Though it is still possible to create coasters, you're more likely to cause errors due to user error, rather than the drive itself. Another measure to prevent coasters is ABS (Anti-Bumping System) Technology. What this does is absorb shock and reduce vibration of spinning discs, which should mean reads and writes are more reliable. This is especially handy with unevenly weighted media spinning at 32x and up.

Another feature to prevent making coasters is the EXACT-Rec technology, which stands for Enhanced eXtracting & Adapting Control Technology for Recording. What this does is monitor the accuracy of the writing. Basically, it'll keep an eye out for the data being written, and make sure that the 1s are 1s and the 0s are 0s.

Other than the drive, MSI provides a drive specific copy of Nero, which is my personal favorite, a Quick Installation Guide, an audio cable, and some screws. They didn't provide CDR media, but they did toss in a 32x CDRW disc.

Test Setup

ABIT NF7-S nForce2: Barton 2500+, 2 x 256MB TWINMos PC3200 Ram, ATI AiW Radeon 9700 Pro, 80GB Maxtor, Windows XP SP1, nForce 2 Unified Driver Package 2.03, ATi Catalyst 3.6.

The comparison drive was the MSI CR52-A2, which we reviewed here.

Benchmarks

We used CD Speed (packaged with Nero) to test the read speeds of the MSI CR52-M. Seeing how MSI claims a 52x read speed, we'll see if they can backup their claims. The test media will be a commercially pressed Quake 3: Arena CD, and a CDRW filled with about 630MB of mixed data. 52x reading has been enabled.

Quake 3: Arena

Q3A does not fill up the whole CD, so we can see that the MSI CR52-A2 never really gets to its maximum performance. It tops out at about 46x, and averages 37x throughout the disc. You'll have to understand that given the nature of CAV technology, the maximum rated speed is only reached at the outer portion of the disc.

I grabbed a CDRW filled with mixed media. Everything from application files, to images, to zip files occupied 630MB worth of space.

630MB CDRW

Since the CDRW occupied most of the disc, we can see the CR52-A2 inching closer to its maximum thoroughput. The drive tops out at about 51x, and averages about 39x through the disc. CPU usage was low as well, so the drive shouldn't drag your system to a halt when reading data CDs.

Burning at 52x will present a couple of hurdles. For one thing, I know that quality 52x media isn't something that's easy to find. Another problem is although 52x may be ok for data backups, audio mastering should be done at lower speeds to maintain compatibility with standard CD drives. I wrote two CDs, both at 52x for this test. One CD was a 695MB mix of data files, ranging from Word docs, to executables. The second CD was 698MB of WAV files to be converted to an audio CD format. The media used was from a spindle of TDK media, rated at 48x, but works fine at 52x.

CD-R Tests

The audio CD burned about three seconds quicker on the CR52-M, which is a nice improvement considering both drives are rated at 52x. Neither drive had any advantage at burning data discs.

The data CD worked on every CD drive on each PC I tested on (two Plextors, an AOpen, and three MSI drives), but one. The audio CD worked on all six drives, as well as my AIWA CD player, but it kept ejecting in my car's CD player. I wasn't too surprised, since it spits almost any disc burned at over 32x.

CDRW Tests

For the CDRW tests, I backed up the same data, minus about 50MB worth of files to fit on the 650MB media. We tested burn speeds at both drives maximum speed using the supplied 32x CDRW media.

Well, seeing as to how the CR52-M has an "8x" advantage, it was no surprise to see the newer drive clobber the older one.

Forced 52x Compatibility

The drive was able to burn the 48x TDK disc we tested with at 52x without any problems. I also had a spindle of 48x Kodaks that went problem free, and some 48x Verbatums that worked fine. I had major data loss with some generics I had lying around though, as the drive allowed 52x burning, but none of the CDs worked at all.

SuperLink Testing

Since SuperLink is a major component of the MSI CR52-M, I thought it'd be a good idea to make sure it works as advertised. Using the same TDK media, we burned the same data used in our 700MB CD-R test at 52x. During the burn process, I proceeded to defrag the drive the data was being retrieved from.

As expected, burn times increased from 2:25 to a whopping 6:04. Since the drive was constantly stopping, given the hard drive activity, it is natural that the burn times are a bit longer. We tested the CD for readability, and as with the earlier compatibility test, just the AOpen 16x DVD had issues.

Final Words

Burning speeds are among the fastest I've ever seen, and discs came out problem free, though I did have a few problems when I tried to burn at 52x on generic discs that had no speed rating. Most of those discs flat out failed. Media burned at their rated speeds worked just fine.

The buffer under run protection seemed to work perfectly, and out of 4 discs burned, none exhibited any problems. I wasn't exactly sure how to test the EXACT-Rec, but seeing how the discs came out fine, I guess it worked.

Noise-wise, the drive is noticably quieter than the CR52-A2, and at 52x burning, it was quieter than our Plextor 32x burner.

It sucks that no IDE cable was provided, but with Nero, and some great hardware features, it's pretty tough for me to pick another drive over this one. Add to it, the very low price point, and my advice is unless you're a "Pro-Insert Manufacturer here" fan, this is a drive you'll want to pick up.

Pros: Fast, ships with Nero, buffer-underun, EXACT-Rec and quiet operation.

Cons: No IDE cable.

Bottom Line: Unless you already have a 40x or higher burner, it's probably time to consider upgrading to a faster drive if you tend to do a lot of CD burning. Considering the overall package is quite impressive, at 40$ this drive is a steal. If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

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