Speedomania: 48x/16x/48x-Burner from LG

No Problems, But Slow - Backup Copies Of Games

The problems we have been seeing recently with audio CDs have plagued games CDs for a long time now. Most games titles come with some form of copy protection, and burning a backup copy can be something of a lottery. THG wanted to see how this CD-R/RW drive would cope with our two games, Comanche4, Serious Sam2.

The CloneCD 4.01.10 screenshot shows the drive's main capabilities.

Since the writer clearly supports CloneCD's RAW-DAO mode, it should be possible to make backup copies.

We use ClonyXXL 2.0.0.6 to determine what kind of protection is being used.

Serious Sam2 is protected with Safedisk 2.51, and Comanche4 with Safedisk2.

To make a copy, we first create an image of the original CD with CloneCD. We then wrote the image to a CD-R. Finally, we checked to see whether we were able to install the copy and run the game.

The drive is not particularly fast reading the original CD. There are drives that will do the job in ten minutes flat. But still, it works and that's the main thing.

Summary

The GCE-8480B from LG Electronics proved to be a very fast writer in our tests using CD-R media. The 16x write speed feature to RW media is a rather a waste of time, because so far there is no media available for this particular speed. In terms of media compatibility, the writer was first class. The 48x writer is also quite comfortable with more specialized tasks like making backup copies of games. Its speed when used as a simple CD player is rather close to that of a 40x drive, apart from with pressed CDs.

As our head-to-head with the previous model, the GCE-8400B, shows, owners of 40x/12x/40x-CD/R/RW drives can breathe easy. The practical performance gains that a 48x writer offers in practice are not great enough to warrant upgrading.