ASUS presents this high-speed DVD burner that does not have a solution for Blu Ray media reading, but supports the Lightscribe feature (of which you can read a small presentation somewhere amongst the pages of the present review). It also supports DVD burning up to 20X speed and comes along with an extra Black Panel while at the same time being supposed to be "optimized" for Windows Vista users. We didn't have the luxury to check this drive on Windows Vista, but, this way or the other this fact, along with the SATA interface, can be considered as some of this drive's advantages.

The retail package of the drive includes the Asus drive, a quick installation guide and Nero 7 Essentials software.As we previously mentioned, an extra blank panel is also included.

Below there is an image of the internal of the drive. The heart of the drive is the Mediatek MT1899LE chipset, also met at the company's 1814BLT 18x DVD burner.

- DVD Info Pro

- Nero Info Tool

Update March 5 2008 - New firmware v1.02 was installed.

In this update, we mainly focus in the areas where the Asus drive had given weak performance, mainly during the burning session with DVD recordable media. The following DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-R DL and DVD+R DL MIDs were burned and tested again:

DVD+R	DVD+R DL	DVD-R	DVD-R DL
CMCMAG M02	MKM003	CMCMAG AM4	MKM 03RD30
MAXELL003		PRODISC F02
MCC004		PRODISC S05
RICOHJPNR03		TTH02
YUDEN000T03		TYG03

In addition, we tested again the reading /writing performance of the drive with 12x DVD-RAM media. The drive burned them at 14x, meeting the nominal speed.

Notice that the reading tests in the following pages were not updated, since no major issues were reported with the original firmware ver1.00 installed.