- Writing Performance

The BenQ DW1640 supports up to 16x burning speed with both +R and -R DVD media formats. Nero Burning Rom's reported speeds are shown below.

By using Nero CD-DVD Speed with DVD-R and DVD+R media, we are able to see the 16X CAV recording technology in action for -R and +R media. You can clearly see that WOPC is activated. Using the Q-Suite, you can disable WOPC, but for the purposes of this review, we chose not to disable this feature, since burning time is decreased slightly, but only by a few seconds. On the other hand, we believe that most users will not choose burning speed over burning quality.

• DVD+R media @ 16X CAV

• DVD-R media @ 16X CAV

The BenQ DW1640 supports 8x DVD+RW writing speed and 6x DVD-RW writing speed. Below, you can see the writing speed graph as reported by Nero CD-DVD Speed.

• DVD+RW media @ 8X Z-CLV

The average reported speed was 7.62x. Like any other 8x capable DVD+RW burner, the 8x "step" is taken early on and the drive keeps on writing at 8x until the recording is finished. You can again see that WOPC is activated.

• DVD-RW media @ 6X CLV

Average burning speed was 5.99x, and the drive started to write at the maximum 6x from the beginning of the writing process.

- Burning Tests

• DVD-R media

The are some key points that are derived from the table above that need further attention. First of all, you will notice that there is no overspeed burning with any media. On the contrary, Optodisc 16x media was burned at 8x and DataWrite 8x media was burned at 4x (even if Nero insist on reporting 8x). All other media were burned at their named speed. Of course, this greatly increases burning quality but reduces speed performance. Best performance came with Verbatim 16x media and it took only 6 minutes to complete a successful burn, but again, an average of 8:20 minutes is a great time for 8x writing.

With -RW 6X media, it took 10:02mins to burn on Verbatim 6x media. This is even better that other burners like the NEC ND-3540A for example.

• DVD+R media

Again, overspeed was not introduced with DVD+R media, just as with DVD-R media. Fortunately, all media was burned at their named speed and no reduced burning speed was observed. It looks like the BenQ DW1640 is more keen on the +R media format, since burning time is further reduced to 5:35 minutes (CMC Magnetics 16x media).

Writing 8x DVD+RW media proved to be even faster than writing -R and +R Write-Once media at 8x. Both Ricoh and MKM media reported 7:26minutes burning time.

- Comparison with other drives

The BenQ model proved to be the fastest with almost all formats except for DVD+R where it was 3 seconds slower than the Pioneer DVR-109.

- DVD Overburning Tests

We used Nero CD-DVD Speed, only to see that the BenQ DW1640 cannot overburn using DVD+R and DVD-R media.

- DVD+MRW Tests

The BenQ DW1640 does not support the Mount Rainier feature.