Acer Ferrari 3200 review (just a few pics/couple benches) - Page 48

just curious does anyone have problem with their dvd-ram?
i was trying to burn dvd-r with a 4x speed disc, however, i was only burning with a speed of 2x even tho alcohol recognizes the burner can burn at 4x....and it has happened to all 3 discs that i just burned
which is really pissing me off because the burner doesn't perform to its expectation
any of the ferrari owner knows the solution to this?
and apparently, i wasn't the only one that have this problem..please see the thread here
http://notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=35943
snorre, please let us know if u have any suggestion to this issue
afterall u are the ferrari god here on the forum, lol!

CBID (Central Brain Identifier) identifies it correctly as Odessa - get it from here:
http://cbid.amdclub.ru

It's an awesome all-in-one tool combining most of the features found in CPU-Z, ClockGen, A64 Tweaker, and more!

It is indeed 4X, just see here:
http://panasonic.co.jp/mke/en/device...d/dmd_825.html
The drive in the Acer Ferrari 3200/3400 is the same that's in the current iMac G5s/PowerBook G4s and it's very picky about the media quality. It will step down on certain media as I've heard from iMac G5/PowerBook G4 users:
http://www.cubeowner.com/forums//ind...showtopic=6930
http://www.cubeowner.com/forums//ind...showtopic=7495
http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=245129
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=96427
The only solution seems to be to use better DVD-R media (Ritek, Maxell, Verbatim, TDK, and perhaps also Fuji will work fine).

LOL i was using RITEK and it still burned at 2x.....well i guess i'll try Taiyo Yuden then, if i could find some good deal on it

snorre, have u try burning dvd? i am sure u have, which brand of discs do you use then?

It seems to me that you're experiencing display driver problems. What version of the drivers are you currently using?

I recommend that you update to the newest available drivers, preferably the Omega drivers that can be found here:
http://omegadrivers.net/ati/win2k_xp.php

Or you can simply try to disable POWERPLAY under the advanced display properties in the control panel.

What was the media code on the Ritek discs you were using then, RITEKG03, RITEKG04 or RITEKG05? RITEKG04 should work fine at 4X speeds AFAIK. See this for a list of RITEKG04 media:
http://www.videohelp.com/dvdmedia.ph...+or+List+Media

I've never heard about Taiyo Yuden and I haven't seen anyone recommending them for this drive either, so I suggest that you try Verbatim, Maxell or TDK instead.

I've just used some cheap generic 2X certified media, so I really can't say for sure.

Merry Yule!

I am using RitekGO4, the disc itself is branded Ritek
so i don't know what's wrong too

Taiyo Yuden is the best media maker but their blanks are pretty expensive

dvd-r media

It's funny you are all having problems with the dvd-burner, I just bought an $8 special of piodata 25 pack dvd-r's off of newegg because I'm cheap, I mean, the disks don't even have labels on them, and they wrote perfect at 4x, and I already went through about ten of them. Of course, they do say "super high grade" in the center ring.

Ok, but hezzy (a user on these forums too) managed to write at 4X speed on his Acer Ferrari 3200 using Maxell and RITEKG04 media:
http://www.cubeowner.com/forums//ind...showtopic=7495

I bet you used the Omega drivers instead of the original ATI drivers.
This was a 'normal' behaviour of the Omega driver package... and has ben
discussed previous in this forum.

waxinator: This issue has been fixed with the latest version of the Omega drivers:
http://www.omegadrivers.net/ati/win2k_xp.php

what is currently best memory upgrade?

Hi, and thanks for all the great info throughout this thread and site.

I have read most of the info here at one time or another but was wondering what is currently considered the best memory upgrade? I'm still running the base memory and want to upgrade to 1Gig minimum. Depending on what is recommended and the current pricing I may go to 2Gig.

I run lots of audio / video apps and Photoshop CS.


Also in reply to the DVD questions. I have had very good luck with Verbatim DVD +R media. I never checked to see what speed it was running at though. If anyone needs / wants any more in depth info, I would be happy to help. also this site is exceptional for cd dvd media and hardware info.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/DVDMediaFormats/

Thanks for any help.

Tom

I recommend upgrading to 2xCorsair XMS3200 SO-DIMM 512MB PC3200 400MHz:
http://corsairmemory.com/corsair/xms.html

Part #: CMXSD512-3200LL XMS3200 512MB 2.5-3-3-6 200 DIMM

PC3200/DDR400 memory will provide the best performance, and considering that this notebook is very picky about 1GB PC3200 SO-DIMM modules (none have been reported to work so far AFAIK) and that the availability of quality 1GB PC3200 SO-DIMM sticks are still limited the above mentioned solution is considered the best memory upgrade today. If you want 2GB then the only solution would be to use 1GB PC2700/DDR333 memory sticks instead, but then the performance would not be better than using the stock memory modules.

The disussion here was regarding compatibility with 4X DVD-R media only, and it seems pretty obvious that the drive is extremely picky and will only write at 4X speed on a very few brands of DVD-R media as I've already pointed out.

Regarding DVD burning, the drive supports 4X speed DVD-R writing, 2X speed DVD-RW writing, 2.4X speed DVD+R writing, 2.4X speed DVD+RW writing and 2X speed DVD-RAM writing. The only issue is with the 4X speed DVD-R writing AFAIK.

Thanks Snorre,

I'll take your advice. No I was not aware of the 2Gig memory problems.

Hopefully the 1Gig you suggest will give me all the performance boost I need.

Thanks also for the DVD update. I normally burn to an external firewire drive but just the past week I burned a few on the ferrari and had no problems. I just thought I would throw that out if it was of any use to anyone.

Thanks again, I'm off to check out the memory.

Tom

Hello
Just want to know about something
The hard drive comes along with Ferrari 3200 is 80 GB ,
however, when I made the whole 80GB a partition,
the resulting space is only 74.5GB.

Thanks

See this for a better explanation than I can give you:

Hard drive showing wrong capacity? Here's why.

Happy New Year!

Blue screen

Hello, I'm new here. I've been lurking this thread for some time now but it's just now that I found the urge to post :-)

I've got a Ferrari 3200 for six months now. I'm sure several of you here experience blue screens during the course of your usage. In the first month of my unit, it crashed 3X that I have to reinstall everything with the restore CD. erasing everything. I have no idea then what was happening but I have no chance of getting the unit back to Acer since I was always on the road (or in the air:-) ). then later I found out that what was crashing my unit was the program Adobe Premiere. After deciding not to install it, I never have to make a system restore again.

But for the next 5 months, bluescreen events(system error type which reboots automatically) are an ordinary event, it's quite frustrating but I have no chance. I'm still running the unit in stock specs, no upgrades. those bluescreen events are very random, sometimes it happens when I'm playing NFSU2 or sometimes when I'm using Softimage XSI (3d) or sometimes when I'm using Ulead Video Studio 8. And there are also times when it happen when I just started windows. Although, once it restarted, the unit will go just fine for the next several hours. At an average, it happens 2X/day.

This is one message from the events viewer: Error code 1000000a, parameter1 0000001c, parameter2 00000002, parameter3 00000001, parameter4 80520ce7.

The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x1000000a (0x0000001c, 0x00000002, 0x00000001, 0x80520ce7). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini010205-01.dmp.

And once, it says about a problem with the graphics accelerator but it never occured again for the last 3 months. But then I still assume that the graphics card driver maybe the culprit so I decided to install the latest Omega driver just last week. Unfortunately, it didn't eliminate the problem. Do you think this is a stability problem with windows????

So my next step would be to upgrade my Windows XP Home to Professional, would this solve it? And also I'm upgrading RAM to Kingston 2 512MB DDR400, replacing the stock memory.

Do I have to send the unit back to Acer or just upgrade right away? I'm just worried they might mess up the paint job, hehehe.

Anyways, any thoughts on how to identify the problem? btw, I've tried memtest and it didn't find any problem although I've had Machine exception blue screen event in the first few weeks, which I later identified what the problem was, I assume.

Machine exception BSODs are usually caused by faulty hardware, usually bad memory so I suggest that you download and run Memtest86+ that you can get from here:
http://www.memtest.org/

You don't have sp2 installed by chance, do you. If so, try uninstalling it and seeing if that solves the problem. Also, if you have time, you can see if its software related by doing an advanced clean-boot troubleshoot. http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;316434

Read my thread: Is it time to contact Acer tech support??
Very similar problems. Acer finally attributed it to a faulty mother board.

No need to worry, they should take very good care of it. You can NOT send it back to Acer for upgrades. They don't do that type of service. But, you MUST call the support line and get a file started on your problems. Then get it back to them for repair ASAP!