Plextor's specs for this and similar Burners call for a "Pentium 4 CPU
1.4GHz or higher". I am upgrading my Dell Dimension XPST700 by means of the
Powerleap PL-iP3/T Slot 1 upgrade adapter to a Tualatin Celeron 1.4GHz CPU.
Does/can the Plextor run on the Celeron, or does it really require the
Pentium 4 CPU?
Maris V. Lidaka Sr.
Their suggestion of a P4 1.4GHz is an overly "dumbed down"
spec which isn't useful to consider. Your Celeron 1.4 is
plenty BUT with the need to use a Powerleap adapter to run
the Celeron, it could be that your system has a lower ATA
rate than optimal for drive performance. For example, the
typical Intel 440BX based motherboards had only ATA33, which
with an idle system could burn DVDs fine but wouldn't leave
a lot of margin for other simultaneous uses.
What they should've written to be more appropriate is that
in general, a system about the age of a P4 1.4GHz is
expected to be able to sustain high enough data throughput
because of the era of hard drive that came with the typical
system of that era, and they were typically ATA66 or higher
data rate. DVD burning in itself isn't particularly CPU
intensive. Some things like realtime MPEG encoding or MP3
creation can require a fairly strong CPU but these are
alternate bonus features, not inherant in making DVDs and
such processing can be done ahead of time on a slower system
if necessary.
In other words, the CPU matters very little when it comes to
typical use of DVD drive, burning DVDs. A P4 400MHz could
do the job fine if you had a new hard drive in the system,
but would struggle if you had an old 4-10GB drive. Hard
drive performance is a moving target and varies by model
(platter density and rotation speed) more than total drive
capacity, but in general a typical performance sufficient
for DVDs should be a >20GB HDD. If you need to continuously
use the system for tasks demanding of the hard drive while
simultaneously burning DVDs, the drive will need be faster-
how much so depending on the demands of that other task(s).
A power user would probably oft to have at least two hard
drives installed in such a system so their other work was
leaving the HDD holding the data being burnt to DVD, mostly
free to do that without much interruption.
