DVD Burners and Processors

[craiger]

Hi. Will DVD Burners ever requier more than a Pentium 4? I'm just wondering if I am still safe with my Dell 4600 If I waited to see if I ever needed a DVD Burner. Thanks, Craig.

[dodecahedron]

what do you mean by "more than a Pentium 4"?
what kind of processor you think would be needed?
there's no Pentium 5 yet!

i think you're pretty safe, and the DVD burners we can expect over the next 2 years will still run fine on a P4.

[craiger]

I was just wondering if they would ever come out with DVD Burners that required a P4 or a P5 if Intel makes a P5. I noticed that some of the DVD Burners require a P3 800. Thanks, Craig.

[dodecahedron]

sure they will, eventually...

you say some of the DVD burners coming out today require a P3 800MHz...how long have these processors been, 3 years? more?
so you can guess that DVD burners coming in the next 3 years will run on today's Pentium 4s.

[cfitz]

I don't think a DVD burner itself will ever require more processor than you have. The highest burning speed we are ever likely to see is 16x, if we even see that. And your processor shouldn't have any trouble keeping up with a 16x data rate, as long as you have DMA enabled.

Now, you might someday want a faster processor if you do a lot of transcoding of mpeg files, since that can be pretty processor intensive. But you would do that ahead of time, not while burning, so it wouldn't affect your use of the burner itself. Unless... what about simultaneous on-the-fly ripping, transcoding and burning, all at 16x??? I don't think so.

cfitz

[Silentbob343]

Intel will most likley release the P5 when the Athlon64 comes out at the end of this year or the begining of next. It's code name is prescott and it will initally have the same "pin count" as the P4 but will eventaully give way to a 775? "pin" version. From the reports I've read it looks like it will consume a good bit of power and dissapate a good bit of heat as well.

The 775?, unsure of the exact number at the moment, won't have standard pins but more like tiny spheres that supposedly allow for a better connection between the proc. and socket.

http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/4810

and I got way off on a tangent.

Like cfitz said if you do lots of transcoding then a faster proc will be better, but you don't need anything to extreme to do the writing it-self.

[Kennyshin]

Even a Celeron 400MHz PC can send data to a 4x DVD writer at 4x reliably (but not through USB 1.1.)

8x DVD is just about 11MB/s. Most notebook hard drives are slow but they will also be upgraded to 7200RPM drives by the time 8x DVD writing goes mainstream on desktop systems.

Faster processors such as Prescott 5MHz are mainly needed for faster HD-DVD encoding and other CPU-intensive tasks. Where HD-ripping is popular, the demand for such processors is very real even now.

[hariskar]

I am planning to buy the new Plextor PX-708A, my first DVD writer. I have a Pnetium III 800, do you think I will have a problem with writing dvds?

[dodecahedron]

no.
read the above posts.