On the OEM Front

Integration is the watchword for today's computers. New system cards routinely include built-in interfaces for floppy and IDE drives and networking. With increasing frequency, built-in SCSI is showing up as standard equipment on high-end system boards. To ascertain how well these systems will perform, we examined a prototype PCI host adapter from Symbios Logic (Fort Collins, CO, (719) 536-3300, http://www.symbios.com ).

The card is based on Symbios's 53C875 UltraSCSI chip ( see the photo ), which is likely to show up on system boards and host adapters from its OEM customers, since it is backward-compatible with Symbios's popular 53C825 fast SCSI PCI chip. The 53C875 is compliant with PCI 2.1 and ANSI's SCSI-3 UltraSCSI standard. Its 536-byte buffer allows efficient bursts on the PCI bus of up to 128 transfers. The chip also allows host-adapter designs that can work in both 3.3- and 5-V PCI slots. In all our performance tests, the Symbios wide UltraSCSI host adapter performed as well or better than the three brand-name adapters we examined.

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It's Everywhere! It's Everywhere!

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