Up
Hardware Sales/Swap
Overclockers' Forum
PC Asylum's Price List
Hardware One
Talk to me

I got it for free at http://come.to

AOPEN 40x CDROM CD 940E
by Overclocker (5/9/98)

First Impressions

As promised, AOPEN sent their 40x CDROM together with 2 other mainboards to me by DHL. I was overjoyed by the fact that they sent me their latest models to evaluate.

I opened up the box and found the 3 packages. I knew that I would definitely test the CDROM drive first. The reason is because I have been using a Panasonic IDE 4x CDROM drive for the past 4 yrs. It was inherited from my 486 machine.

I took out the CDROM drive from the package, found it to be in a very nicely designed box. I read the small wordings on the side of the box and found that this CDROM is really a well engineered CDROM. An eye-catching photograph of what is meant by "Dynamic Damping System (DDS)" really impressed me! Here is the extract :

An external force "F" will be gernerated on traverse if CD-ROM drive rotating with an unbalanced disk. As shown in the drawing on left side, M3 means traverse, M2 is so called "Dynamic Damper" & M1 means loader & case. The effect of having such a "Dynamic Damper" is to reduce the vibration of traverse & loader to only 1/3 or even less of CD-ROM at 8700 RPM. This will improve operation and disk accessibility.

I opened up the box, took out the CDROM drive and mounted it onto my Celeron 448 System. Packaged together with the CDROM drive is a CDROM installation diskette, leaflet and a CDROM audio cable that is usually not packaged with other brands of CDROM drives. That would save you the trouble of having to buy the CDROM<->Sound card cable from another shop.

The documentation that comes with it is the leaflet in different languages. There is another sheet of paper titled "Read me First", it shows how you could enable/disable UDMA/33 on your CDROM drive. As suggested by AOPEN, the UDMA/33 is disabled by default for system stability issue. I checked the CDROM drive, the jumper is not there, so it implies that UDMA is enabled.

AOPEN suggests that to it is necessary to use the Triones Bus Mastering driver for better compatibility and says that most UDMA drivers are not designed to support CDROM drive.

I installed the CDROM drive and rebooted my machine. It is recognised as AKU/40x. I am still wondering why they use AKU instead of AOPEN 40x. It does not really matter and I thought immediately that this could be due to a no updated BIOS on my mainboard.

Everything works just perfectly well with this new CDROM drive. No configuration needed at all. Now it is time to test out the CDROM drive. I pop in Star Craft CDROM, within 1/2 sec, the main screen appeared! That really surprised me.

One thing about the CDROM drive is that you can hear the motor spinning faintly in the background. Most of the time, it is very quiet compared to other 24x ~ 36x CDROM drives.

I tried booting with the CDROM drive with my NT Beta 2. No problems at all! It's so fast that I classify it as a screamer! This drive is a good match for gamers or even system admins who wants high speeds during installation and playing games off CDROM drives.

Key Features

Specifications

Benchmarks

The CDROM drive is tested on a ABIT BH6 with Celeron 266 o/c 448Mhz 96Mb of SDRAM using Windows 95 OSR 2.1. With Intel UDMA/33 drivers installed. DMA Enabled on CDROM drive.

Winbench 98/CD-ROM WinMark 98:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec)     1740
Winbench 98/CD-ROM Playback:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec)         1740
Winbench 98/CD-ROM/Access Time(Milliseconds)                            97
Winbench 98/CD-ROM/CPU Utilization                                           7.6
Winbench 98/CD-ROM /Transfer Rate:Inside (Thousand Bytes/Sec)   3240
Winbench 98/CD-ROM /Transfer Rate:Outside (Thousand Bytes/Sec) 6070

Conclusion

I would highly recommend this CDROM drive as it cheap and good. It is priced at S$119 at Comex Singapore. The documentation is also very clear. No guessing work involved in configuring it.

I trust that with AOPEN's Quality Control and engineering work on this CDROM drive, it is a CDROM that would solve all your needs. It performed as stipulated in the specs.

The Inside 3240 Thousand Bytes/Sec and Outside speed of 6070 Thousand Bytes/Sec is quite a contrast to ASUS 40x. (see report on ASUS 40x).

Basically, AOPEN 40x has quite a good design and very stable performance. It is truly a "must buy" for those who wants to upgrade at a nominal cost.