Blu-ray Burner Upgrade

by Michael
(Southampton, UK)

Hi there,

I have a Dell Dimension 5000 which is about 5 1/2 years old and I want to upgrade to a Blu Ray burner.

My PC has two bays, one with a CD reader/writer and
one with a CD/DVD reader/writer.

My question is, can I take out the CD drive and retain the DVD one and replace the CD with a Blu Ray burner?

My other concern is what is the best way to connect the IDE lead that goes to my CD bay, as I assume the new
Blu Ray drive will have a SATA connector?

Regards

Michael

PC Tips and Tricks Answers:

Hi Michael,

Nice to hear from you :) as you only have IDE available on your motherboard connecting a Blu-ray drive with a SATA interface to your PC will require the use of a PCI to SATA controller card which you can purchase quite cheaply and install in a free PCI slot in your motherboard.


Based in UK Southampton your best bet would probably be Novatech who are based in Portsmouth and give excellent pricing and support.

Or, you can purchase an IDE to SATA converter that plugs directly into your IDE connector on the motherboard - just do a search on Google.

So, basically yes the actual installation of your Blu-ray burner shouldn't be a problem and you will be able to use your new drive as a high capacity storage device (25GB for single layer and 50GB for dual layer).

More of a concern however is whether or not your PCs graphics card is up to the job of playing High Def Blu-ray movies which presumably you also require?

If so your graphics card must comply with HDCP (High Definition Content Protection) in order to run in full high def mode but your monitor must be also be compliant.

You'll also need to ensure that your CPU and RAM are up to the job.

To check your machine over for full compliance you can download a great little utility from Cyberlink, just go to http://www.cyberlink.com/prog/bd-support/diagnosis.do and download from the support section. This utility will check over your PC and tell you what you need in order to play Blu-ray movies.

Your Dell Dimension 5000 machine, although a lovely spec back in 2005 came with a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 and I think only 1GB of PC3200 RAM and won't be up to the job as is.

You have two PCI slots and a PCI Express slot but I believe that both of your PCI slots are presently taken up with a 56k Modem card and a Creative Sound Blaster card.

You can easily check this out and could remove the old 56k modem and replace it with the PCI to SATA converter.

The graphics card is a GE Force 6800 which will definitely need replacing in order to play Blu-ray movies.

Hope this helps Michael, good luck and let me know how you get on.