LG 84xx series giving slow burns

[CameraMan]

Having a problem with some burners and possibly other hardware in my system.

My current system is this:

LG 8401B 1.03 (2mb, bought at 8400B, changed it to GCE-8401B 1.3)
LG 8400B 1.03 (2mb, not changed the firmware yet)
LG 8481B 1.04 (2mb, flashed it up about a week ago)

Mother Board: VIA EPIA C3 800mhz , 512mb, Syba PCI ATA/133 card

Windows 2000 SP 5

Alcohol 120% 1.4.0 (Build 114)

The problem is that the 40x drives show the media I'm using as 40x, but they don't burn more than 24x. My 8481B reports the media as 24x and burns as 24x.

When I burn, my CPU use goes up to about 40% while it fills the buffer, but sits at less than 5% the rest of the way.

The files I'm burning are audio disc images made with Alcohol, the images are sitting on my hard drives.

I'm really wondering why I get such slow burn speeds.

Each burner is on it's own IDE channel (shared with a hard drive).

When I share an IDE cable with 2 burners, my speeds might reach 6x at the most, hence the added PCI-ATA/133 card. It's reporting some great speeds for HDD access.

I remember having faster burns with these drives (same discs)... don't know why this is so slow.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.

[CameraMan]

PS:

I'll add that I'm using Ritek discs, label says they are 40x.

I'll pull a burner from my dup machine and plug it into my surfer box, see if that changes anything.

[cfitz]

I don't give this high chances at solving your problem as you describe it, but for comleteness we always have to ask if DMA is properly enabled whenever anyone reports trouble with slow burns:

http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=9668

cfitz

[CameraMan]

Well, I got snookered. Seems I bought a mix of CD-R brands without knowing it. My slow burns were from a stack of Ritek discs, but a new stack I opened, CMC Magnetics, burn perfect up to 48x.

Both stacks were sold as '1x-40x' but of course, that's a load of poop.

So I've got 3 stacks (100's) of the crappy Riteks and 2 of the CMC's. Yayy.

I'll see if I can work something out with the store I got these from.