These days, 40x CD writers are in the elite pack, making 32x units great buys on a value-for-money basis.
Benq drives used to be known under the brand name Acer. Thankfully, prices have stayed at wallet-friendly Acer levels, making the Benq 3210A 32x/10x/40x (32x speed write, 10x rewrite and 40x speed read) drive one of the cheapest 32x CD burners around. If you wondered, it's apparently pronounced "Ben Queue", not "Benk". No, we don't know why, either.
Value for Money
Though low-priced, the 3210A includes Benq's own Seamless Link buffer-under run technology, which prevents "data starvation" gaps from appearing on the disc as they are being written, thus ruining it.
Costing only AU$389, you won't expect to find an overflowing bundle of software of accessories. Inside the box is an analog audio cable, DOS drivers on a floppy, a few thin manuals and Nero Burning ROM software on CD. One blank CD-R and a CD-RW is included. No IDE cable is supplied, nor any software for music CD-ripping.
Installation into an Athlon XP 1600 computer with 256 MB of DDR memory was fuss-free. After that came the software install. Version 5.5.7.1 of Nero Burning ROM is supplied. For Windows XP users, you'll need to track down version 5.5.8.0, which can be found on Nero's website.
In Testing
We ran three tests on the 3210A: Burning a 500 MB image file on CD-R to test writing speed, ripping a 10-song music CD to WAV format to check digital audio extraction (DAE) speed, and copying a 280 MB file from CD-ROM to hard disk to test read speed.
In the first test, the Benq 3210A took 2 minutes 53 seconds to write the image file to CD-R. This isn't bad for a drive of this speed, but doesn't point to a huge speed increase over slower drives.
The second test had a score of 3 minutes 25 seconds for the Benq 3210A in ripping 10 songs to WAV, using AudioCatalyst software. This is slow, and puts the Benq behind drives with even lower writing speeds.
In the third benchmark (the 280 MB copy test of a group of folders containing both small and large files) the Benq 3210A took 1 minute 43 seconds, which isn't exceptional.
The test results show the Benq 3210A to be an ordinary drive with a slight edge in CD burning speeds, which is exactly what you should expect at this price point.
Speed Control Quirks
There are several quirks to take note of. When we use Ricoh media rated at 24x with the Benq 3210A, Nero stubbornly fixed the maximum write speed at 16x. Only when Benq's own media was used did Nero allow the 32x option. This shows how carefully users must pick their media--the printed speed alone is not a good indicator of how your drive will actually regard it.
Benq 3210A 32x/10x/40x
Company: Benq
Price: AU$389
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: (02) 9714 6800
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