A
s far as we’re concerned, the Blu-ray burner to beat these days is LG’s
GGW-H20L1 (reviewed December 2007). Unfortunately for Sony, its BWU-200S
isn’t the drive to do it. We pretty much knew this before we even began testing the
drive—after all, the BWU-200S is rated for 4x Blu-ray write speeds compared to the
LG’s 6x speed rating.
And true to form, LG’s drive trounced Sony’s in every Blu-ray burning scenar-
io. What surprised us was how much slower the BWU-200S was compared to even
its 2x predecessor, the BWU-100A that we reviewed in April 2007. Using the latest
version of Nero CD-DVD Speed to test burn times, as we always do, the BWU-200S
took a glacially slow 99:47 (min:sec) to fi ll a single-layer BD-R disc. That’s almost an
hour and 40 minutes to write 22.5GB of data! Its
2x forebearer took less than half that time.Repeated tests with rewriteable and double-layer Blu-ray media produced similarly
abysmal results. What gives?
A call to Sony provided the answer. By default, the BWU-200S’s defect-
management routine is enabled for Blu-ray media. So every block of data writ-
ten to a BD disc is simultaneously checked for errors, doubling burn times. The
feature can be disabled, but only in the bundled Power2Go burning app—part
of the CyberLink suite that is included with the drive. Once we did that, the
BWU-200S’s burn times were more reasonable—45:38 to fi ll a single-layer
BD-R, 45:17 to fi ll a single-layer rewriteable disc, and 91:13 for double-layer
media—but these times still aren’t as good as those of other 4x drives we’ve
tested (and we haven’t tested any other drive that performed better with BD-RE
than BD-R!). The most impressive result came from burning 45.2GB of data to
Sony’s prerelease 4x BD-R DL media. Burn times were literally cut in half when
compared to burning to a 2x disc. We’re looking forward to using the
faster media with a really good
drive, like LG’s GGW-H20L1.
—KATHERINE STEVENSONSony BWU-200S
The hours we spent testing this Blu-ray burner hardly seem worth it
S
weet mercy, at fi rst glance Koolance’s PC4-1025BK case seems like a
perfect power-user box. Unfortunately, this water-cooling-enriched case is
simply too small to contain certain enthusiast hardware and too complicated for
the average user.
The case integrates a water-cooling mechanism directly into the
chassis—Koolance’s KIT-1000KB cooler, a tri-fan setup that comes with a
front-mounted controller mechanism for auto-adjusting the fans’ speeds.
The whole getup is a tidy little package that cools monstrous amounts even
when using the quietest mode the PC4-1025BK offers.
But impressive benchmark scores do little to alleviate our utter
contempt for the design and building process that accompanies the PC4-
1025KB, an experience wholly unlike what one encounters with the similarly
outfitted Gigabyte Mercury Pro (January 2007).
Building a functioning machine in the case is nightmarishly complicat-
ed. You have to assemble the CPU water block yourself, attach the tubing,
and somehow wedge a motherboard
and high-end components upside-downamidst these plastic modified
tentacles. A 7.1-inch-long
power supply doesn’t even fit
in this Lian-Li case—unless
you remove a drive bay. An
Nvidia 8800 GTX barely fits in
the case as well.
It doesn’t help that
Koolance neglects to include a manual for the case itself. You get a manual
detailing everything you need to know about the accompanying water-cool-
ing mechanism, but no guidance on how to set up anything else in the case.
True power users may never refer to a manual, but it’d be nice to have a
reference during the installation process.
Midtower cases might work for some high-end rigs, but the PC4-
1025BK proves that an antiquated design plus tons of tubing
spells disaster.
—DAVID MURPHYKoolance PC4-1025BK
Awesome cooling alone does not an awesome case make
reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED
5
KOOLANCE PC4-1025BK6
SONY BWU-200S
$600, http://www.sony.com$555, http://www.koolance.comKoolance’s PC4-1025BK
is cluttered before any
components are installed.
We had to remove part of
the reservoir just to fit in
our parts.74 MAXIMUMPC (^) | FEB 08 (^) | http://www.maximumpc.com
BENCHMARKS
LG GGW-H20LI SONY BWU-200S SONY BWU-100A
DVD WRITE SPEED AVERAGE 12.09x 11.23x 6.78x
DVD READ SPEED AVERAGE 9.24x 11.73x 6.17x
ACCESS TIME (RANDOM/FULL) 99ms/192ms 155/305ms 130/317ms
CPU UTILIZATION (8X) 23% 31% 34%
TIME TO BURN 22.5GB TO BD-R (MIN:SEC) 21:23 99:47 42:19
TIME TO BURN 22.5GB TO BD-RE (MIN:SEC) 39:38 97:52 93:13
Best scores are bolded. All tests were conducted using the latest version of Nero CD-DVD Speed and Verbatim media (except
where noted). Our test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine using a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800
RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI motherboard, one EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS card, a Western Digital 500GB Caviar hard drive, and a PC
Power and Cooling Turbo Cool PSU.
There are some good things to Sony’s BWU-200S, such as its
SATA interface and handsome faceplate.
BENCHMARKS
Best scores are bolded. Idle temperatures measured after an hour of inactivity; load temperatures measured after an hour
of CPU Burn-In (four instances). Test system is a stock-clock QX6700 processor on an EVGA 680i mobo with an Nvidia
8800 GTX graphics card
(^) KOOLANCE KOOLANCE
STOCK COOLER PC4-1025BK (LOW) PC4-1025BK (HIGH)
IDLE (C) 38.6 25.4 23.5
100% LOAD (C) 71.4 42.1 37.3