Looking into purchasing a DVD drive, along with a new soundcard maybe...

[EvilYoda]

Need another CD-ROM, but figured I'd get a DVD ROM instead. I don't do much ripping, (although divx might be a possibility, it's not a big problem) and I'd like some opinions, or maybe some links to some review sites, on which DVD-ROM would be best, as per speed, quality and being quiet.

Same thing goes for a soundcard....currently using a SB Live! Value, but I was wondering if any cards out there had a built-in optical digital out, so I could run it to my receiver. (I'm doing that already, but the quality would be so much better if I had a toslink connection)

Thanks for your help.

 

[jaredm77]

I, along with many other users around here, like the Toshiba SD-M1502 16x/48x DVD-ROM drive. It's extremely quite and I've installed them on several machines and have never ran into any kind of problem.

 

[jaredm77]

I now that the SB Live! 5.1 has a digital out, and I believe that both the Hercules Game Theater XP and Turtle Beach Santa Cruz have them.

 

[bigbootydaddy]

hercules GTXP has everything sblive has, cept for the problems.

and possiblilty to add 14,512 speakers....aka a butt load.

(no the number isnt real, just the idea.)

 

[EvilYoda]

Thanks for the input, but by digital, I didn't mean a regular mini-out, I wanted an optical toslink output. I suppose I could always use a mini-to-toslink, but I was mainly wondering about the toslink output.

 

[mdXtreme3d]

the GTXP has a toslink optical output.
on the cheaper end, some of the Vortex-2 based cards (aureal superquad, others) have it as well.
if you do end up getting a sblive, beware that the mp3/x-gamer 5.1's with the digital out are not in spec (voltage wise) and may not work properly with your receiver (the live value II and platinum are fine).

 

[HaVoC]

DVD drive recommendation:

Just ordered and installed the AOpen DVD-1240 drive from Newegg.com.

This EIDE 12x/40x drive is at a great price ($51 shipped if you live outside Cali). I've already tried ripping DVDs with it and it gets around 5.0x to 7.5x transfer rate which is pretty good. You can check DVD and CDaudio rip rates for various drives at this site

Note that the DVD-1240 is not yet listed. The digital audio extract rate is probably not that good (around 10X) for doing direct copies of CDs.

The one problem with this drive is that it is fairly noisy. (higher pitch whine on spool up) But it spools up quicker than my Plextor 32X SCSI CD drive.

Note that this drive is NOT region free and no one yet has confirmed a region-free firmware for the drive. This may be important to you if you have a lot of Anime DVDs, etc.

 

[EvilYoda]

Alright, thanx everyone......yeah, i've been hearing a lot about the GTXP, but I don't know if I want to spend that much money on a sound card...and now that my DVD player can handle mp3 CDs...anyway, thanx again. Looks like Toshiba or AOpen.