Pioneer DVD-105S IDE DVD ROM - Page 4

DVD Tests

- Test Method :
We used DVD Speed 99 v0.2 to run DVD tests (DMA enabled for both drives). All tests done at least 3 times, took worst results, with same DVD title. The DVD Speed author suggests avoiding using dual layer DVDs since the performance might be lower than the actual one. For that propose we used a single-layered DVD title, which taken from PC Magazine.

- DVD Speed results:

As you can see the Pioneer DVD-105S manages to deliver around 15.000kb/s and confirms the title of the faster DVD-Rom around. The seek times for DVD reading are lower than the ones we got from the CD test and are better than 104S model. The CPU usage is also very low.

- DVD Ripping Tests
Yes, we know what you might think: "We got our DVD-Rom, now we need to make a DivX ;) from it". So we need to rip the movie in our HD. Is there any difference between the 2 models since the 105S supports 16x reading DVD-Rom speed? The answer seems to be no. We tested both drives with the Matrix movie and with DVD Decrypter v2.1. Below are the results when we ripped the whole movie:

As you can see both drives have similar average ripping speed. The increased 16x DVD-Rom reading speed of DVD-105S doesn't seem to affect the DVD ripping performance.

- Movie Tests :
We tested Pioneer DVD-104S with many DVDs and our total impression is pretty good. When playing DVD movies average CPU Usage was 77% using Power DVD v3.0. If you have a SVGA card with hardware acceleration and you enable it, the CPU usage will drop nearly at 50%! We faced some problems when we enabled Hardware Acceleration with Power DVD 3.0 and 6.49 & 7.17 nVidia Detonator drivers. The picture appeared scrambled so we couldn't use the hardware acceleration. Also don't forget to grab DVD Genie, which will help you change regions for the software player. This will not defeat the hardware region lock (which can be overcome with region-free firmware).