The Blu-ray and HD DVD battle is still raging in lounge rooms, and both sides will tell you they’re winning the war. On the desktop it’s just getting started, but users have been much slower to take up arms for one side or another.

Although both of these drives have been available for some time, they’re still a rare find in a desktop PC, primarily due to cost and fence sitting users, waiting to see which format “wins”. It hasn’t stopped the manufacturers though, with Pioneer, LG, BenQ, Lite-On, Samsung, Sony and now ASUS all releasing Blu-ray models on the market.

We took a look at the ASUS BC-1205PT drive, which is a BD-ROM (read only for Blu-ray) combo drive, also supporting DVD±RW at 12x, DVD±R DL at 4x and DVD±RW at 6x. The drive only reads BD-ROM at 1x, so this is purely a Blu-ray playback drive, and not a fast one at that.

This model is SATA. Physically, the drive is short so fitting it in to small cases or small form factor systems when building a HTPC shouldn’t be a problem.

It’s bundled with a full suite of optical disk software from CyberLink, including software for playback and burning CD, DVD and BD disks.

In essence, this drive is a compromise. It provides BD-ROM support for playback at the cost of a 20x DVD burner, though its performance is spot-on for its stated specs. We’ve no real complaints about the drive, but we’ll stay sitting on the fence.