Hi,

I've got the dell gwa-4164b and I would like to know if it burns at 16x using CAV.

According to the following screenshots it uses P-CAV. Also, does anyone know why the speed drops to 12x at the end.

Thanks

That drive uses a Panasonic chipset, so it should burn 16x using CAV. However, it does 12x burns using P-CAV. So when the speed dropped at the end, it became a P-CAV burn. P-CAV essentially starts out as a CAV burn but the speed levels out and stays constant till the end of the disc at a certain point in the burn.

If it had continued without the speed drop, it would have ended up as a CAV burn.

It's hard to tell you why the speed dropped near the 3GB mark. There are various possible reasons :

1. The quality of the disc wasn't that good around the 3GB mark, so the writer dropped writing speed to compensate
2. You hard drive is rather fragmented and once the burn speed reached 14x, the hard drive couldn't supply data fast enough to keep up with the writer. So the writer dropped writing speed to a rate acceptable to the hard drive
3. You have an old IDE chipset which doesn't allow your writer to hit 16x

Btw, is that disc a Memorex or Maxell 16x DVD+R by any chance? If so, then know that there have been reports of burning problems with media of this media code under those brands. Ricoh branded 16x DVD+R discs are fine, though.

Try burning using some other brand of discs to eliminate possibility 1. Verbatim is a good choice for that. Defragment your hard drive first though, and that should eliminate possibility 2. As for 3, leave it as a last resort until you have dealt with the causes of 1 and 2.