Gigabyte GO-W1616C

If you're fussy about your drive's appearance, then you will appreciate the extra bezel that Gigabyte supplies with this drive, which allows you to dress it up in either black or white. For extra funkiness, you could mix and match the tray plate with the main bezel and become the only kid on the block with a black and white burner!

Aesthetics aside, during our tests this inexpensive unit provided excellent DVD write performance using the CAV method, but slightly sluggish read performance.

During our testing, it mysteriously changed from using Ultra DMA mode to PIO mode. This was perhaps due to the drive having a problem reading one of our pressed discs, and it took us a few system restarts to get the drive working in DMA mode again. For the record, using PIO mode with this drive, even on a powerful system, really made for snail-paced burning and used up to 100 per cent of our system CPU.

The drive comes with Nero Express 6 and PowerDVD. That's fantastic value considering this drive can be found for less than $100.