CD read speeds
Let's start the benchmarking by seeing just how well it performs in its ancillary duty of reading various CD-based discs. Firstly, let's see how well it reads audio discs.
Using Clannad's Best of album, we see that the TX Venus II is anything but a slouch at reading pressed media. Starting off just above 20x, it peaks at over 50x, faster than specification. The average read speed, at just below 40x, is one of the most impressive to date. The access times are better than average, too. It's of a little concern that the drive uses almost 20% of a 2.8GHz CPU's power at 8x.
Factory-pressed CDs are usually no problem for most drives. However, some fall down on reading CD-Rs. After all, the quality differs from disc to disc. To test its ability to read a CD-R, I used a pre-burned copy of my benchmark CD.
The graph is very similar to the pressed audio one presented above. Strangely, the seek times have increased a little but the CPU usage has gone down markedly. It appears indifferent to the media that you throw at it.
