Hi,
My new NEC 3500AG will not brun faster then 2x. Burning a dvd (4.7 Gb) takes about 35 minutes. 
I’ve got a dell 8300 Pentium 4 3.0Gh FSB800Mz, 512 Mb.
I’ve recplace my ‘old’ nec 1300A, but I don’t see any improvement in speed.
Burnign double sided will take about 1 hour, wich is not acceptable.
Any suggestions.
Rob
… sure, there’s anything going wrong … maybe it’s a fault in your hardware-configuration
. . did you check if DMA is enabled ?? … just have a look at your IDE-controller in hardware setup,
. . than right-click --> options --> possibility of ‘PIO’ or ‘DMA’
Burnign double sided will take about 1 hour
… do you really think about double-sided, a very rar media (both sides of a DVD are writeable)
. . or do you mean DoubleLayer, a one-sided DVD with a capacity of 8.5GB ??
DMA is enabled in the hardware config, but the system selects PIO anyway.
–> Yes I mean dual layer, I’m from the floppy age … sorry 
Should my write be the master? I’m not using ‘On the Fly’
Checked my bios.
When I bought my new PC, I put in my DVD as a second DVD player. The second IDE slave was not enabled in the bios. :o
Strange that the drive worked without being enabled?
After correcting this, DMA was select in the hardware setting and it worked like a charme (14:45 minutes). 
Thanks for the input guys, I’m as happy as a pig in sh#t. 
Welcome ! Just a suggestion you might get better results burning if you set up your system with the 3500 as your master on IDE 2.rather than the slave. 
I will change the master / slave jumpers.
Do I need to change the order in which cable runs by the dvd players?
the end of the ribbon is for the master and the middle connector is for the slave.
I too have a dell computer with 3500ag burner. But i have my nec3500 as a slave and in my dell it purrs like a kitten–no problems and it works great for me–just my 2 cents if thats any help to you—if you know whay i mean!
my theory that i enjoy is “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”—