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Mikael Hagén puts Creative's DVD kit to the test. |
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Encore 6X- Mikael Hagén - Last updated 9/22/99 Installation: The installation is rather easy and I got it installed within 15 minutes but it took sometime until I managed to get it to work since every time I tried to play a DVD movie it rebooted my computer. I found that you cannot place the Dxr3 card in PCI slot 1 if you have an AGP card since they then will share the same IRQ, which will cause your computer to reboot when you play a DVD movie.After changing slot it worked well. Creative also provides easy to follow instruction for those that have little experience installing PCI cards and/or drives. You'll start the installation with deciding whether you want the DVD drive to be master or slave. Creative recommends you have it as master for optimum performance but I installed it as slave with no problems. The next step is to connect the drive to the power source and connect the drive to the motherboard with the provided IDE cable. After that you install the Dx3 card in a free PCI slot. You then need to connect the Dxr3 card to your soundcard. You can do this by connecting the Dxr3 card's internal audio-out of the to one of the analog in connectors on your soundcard (usually CD-in or Aux-in) with the provided audio cable. If you for some reason don't want to do it internally you could use the external Line out jack of the Dxr3 card and either connect it using an audio cable (not included) directly to your speaker system or to the Line in on your soundcard. This is useful if you use one speaker set to watch DVD movies and another to play back audio from your sound card in games and other PC applications. If you have a Dolby Digital 5.1 system you definitely want to connect the S/PDIF out to your AC-3 decoder. The Dxr3 card supports two audio in connectors, which you could use to get CD-music from one or two CD/DVD drives. These jacks are optional and you don't need to connect the DVD drive to them if your soundcard has enough audio in connectors. Finally, you need to connect your Dxr3 card to the monitor and/or TV. If you want to connect it to the monitor you need to use a passthrough cable (similar to the Voodoo 2 ones but with the important difference it must be connected to your VGA card to work) which you connect between your graphics card and the Dxr3 card. If you want to use a TV you'll need to connect the decoder card to the TV using a S-Video video cable. If you only have an RCA video cable you need to use the S-Video to composite converter cable that is included. After the hardware installation is done you just start up Windows 95 or 98 and put in the diskette when windows asks for drivers. The DVD program can then be installed from the CD. The final step happens when you start the DVD player and it tries to calibrate itself to provide the best quality picture possible on your monitor. If the result isn't what you want you'll be able to calibrate it yourself. You can also change the colour saturation, brightness and contrast.
Performance: DVD driveThe DVD drive is fast both as a CD-ROM drive and DVD drive, with a maximum performance of 24X/3.6 MB/s and 6X/8.1 MB/s respectively. Games and other multimedia applications don't require more than 4x CDROM or 2X DVD so there is plenty of speed to spare. The extra speed is really only useful when you install programs or copy files from the DVD player. A few copy tests I made to the HD drive showed performance to vary between slightly above 2 MB/s and slightly below 1 MB/s with both DVD and CD-ROM discs. This counts the time to write the file to the HD so actual read performance should be better and if I followed Creative's recommendation to install it as master I probably would have got even better results. As a comparison my two 5400 HD's are about 4 times faster for transfers but about 10 times faster for access. I don't think anyone will find any problem with the performance of this DVD and I doubt any CD-ROM drive would give significantly lower installation time. More interesting is DAE (used when ripping CD-AUDIO CDs) speed, which I found to be about 11-12X. There are CD-ROM drives with even higher results but 11-12X DAE speed is quite impressive and should be more than enough for most people. I found the quality to be good and the only problem that occurred was that one long CD (75 minutes) couldn't rip the last track in digital mode. However, it worked well to play the track and record it in analog mode which gives good enough quality for most people and if you have a soundcard with a digital CD in like the Live the transfer will still be digital. When it comes to audio quality the drive provides good quality both using the headphone jack and after passing through the soundcard. As mentioned if you have a Live or LiveValue you will be able to use the digital in. The drive in addition to CD-ROM, CD-AUDIO, DVD-ROM and DVD-VIDEO also supports DVD-R, CD-I, CD Extra, CD-ROM/XA, Photo CD®, CD-R, and CD-RW. I didn't test all these different formats but with the about 20 different DVD's and 10 audio CD's I tested I only found one compatibility problems that was related to the drive. The problem was that the pan&scan side of the Cliffhanger didn't work but it didn't work with the Encore 2X either. There is no region code on the drive so it will work with the region the DVD player demands but the Dxr3 card has a region code that can't be changed. However a crack for the region code is available on the http://www.visualdomain.net/ site. |
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