Future Power - Power Series P3-500

The Power Series now ships standard with a 20.4GB Western Digital Caviar drive. The drive itself is Ultra ATA 66 compliant, but since there is no Ultra ATA 66 controller on-board the ABIT BH6, the drive acts as if it were a regular Ultra ATA 33 drive. Before you get all worked up about that, let's talk about what kind of Ultra ATA 66 drive the 20.4GB Caviar is.

With a rotational spin speed of 5400 RPM, chances are that the Ultra ATA 33's 33MB/s max burst transfer rate isn't being that big of a limitation in this case. The drive does feature a hefty 2MB buffer, but we would have preferred the faster, albeit smaller, 18GB 7200 RPM Western Digital Expert drive to the slower Caviar solution at a competitive price ($20 - $30 difference in price).

The thing to notice here is that Future Power opted for the larger hard drive because of its lower cost but, from the performance aspect, the 7200 RPM Expert drive is the more intelligent choice. Since disk performance is the limiting factor in many cases, the faster drive would be ideal but, without the benefit of an Ultra ATA 66 controller to support the higher burst transfer rates, the slower 5400 RPM drive makes more sense. This is because it offers essentially the same performance (the 7200 RPM drive being limited by Ultra ATA 33) with the larger Caviar drive offering more space at a lower cost.

The system came with a pre-installed internal IDE Zip (100MB) removable disk drive. The usefulness of this option is debatable. Although the drive comes with a single 100MB Zip disk, unless you use up the 20GB of hard drive space (around 18GB free upon the first time you boot the machine up) or have other computers with Zip drives that you need to exchange files with this will probably be one of the least used features of the system.

The review unit we received featured a 6X Toshiba DVD drive however, Future Power's site states that the system will ship with either the Toshiba or the Sony 6X drive; the differences between the two are negligible. The drive doubles as a 32X CD-ROM drive as do all DVD drives in this performance class.

The drive does not feature any hardware decoder card and interfaces directly with the BH6's IDE controller on the secondary channel all by itself (the HDD & Zip drives are placed on the primary channel). Since there is no support for hardware DVD playback, the task is offloaded onto your CPU using Zoran's SoftDVD2. The quality of the playback is pretty good, but it still can't beat a set top DVD player or the output of a hardware DVD decoder. Unfortunately, due to the fact that the Diamond Stealth III S540 does not feature a TV-output connector, there is no way of outputting your DVD playback onto a regular TV screen. Very disappointing.

The playback was smooth as long as there were not any programs running in the background. As with all software DVD solutions, even if you are running on a Pentium III 500, multitasking while playing back a DVD movie with a software decoder isn't the best idea if you want smooth playback.