Firmware: 130D

Unlike the DR4-A, the 8x version writes to all rewritable's at a speed of 4x - a laudable increase, as it reduces the amount of time it takes to write a complete DVD from around 25 minutes to 15 minutes.

8x burning speed are so far limited to DVD+Rs; the DR8-A can write to minus discs at the customary 4x speed.

When recording CDs, the MSI burners support a feature called HD Burn (High Density Burn) that doubles the capacity of a 700 MB blank CD to 1.4 GB.

The DR8-A's performance values all fall squarely within the acceptable range. That's an easy coup in the field of burners we tested, considering it's the newest model.

The faster of the MSI burners also comes out ahead of the competition in extracting audio data and SVCDs - none can beat it in terms of overall speed.

MSI includes Nero and MyDVD from Sonic in the package. Otherwise, the manual is all you get besides an 8x blank DVD and an audio cable - neither installation screws nor a data cable were included in our test unit.