The CryptoSwift 600's performance demonstrates the difference between an appliance and an integrated solution. Most vendors in our review resell this card and integrate it with their hardware solutions, thus achieving much better performance than when the card is integrated with the Web server.

The CryptoSwift 600 is distributed with both diagnostic and performance-monitoring tools.

The CryptoSwift 600's installation is much more automated than that of the nForce 300 or the AXL300, offering an (almost) manual-effort-free experience. Only a single entry in the Web server's configuration file is required, unlike the multistep process required by the competition.

As expected, performance of our Web server did increase when off-loading SSL routines to the CryptoSwift 600. The results are not as impressive as we would have liked, but the 200 SSL transactions per second it squeezed out of our Web server are still nothing to sneeze at.

CryptoSwift 600, $12,989. Available: Now. iVea Technologies, a division of Rainbow Technologies, (877) 274-4832, (949) 206-7000; fax (949) 206-7050. www.rainbow.com