Atto was an interesting addition to our test as the company is using the QLogic ISP2300 chip as the engine for its board. Don't rush to judgment, however -- the company has its own clean board design and its own BIOS and drivers. The performance of this card was very good, in some cases better than that of the QLogic board, but the CPU utilization was high on some of our tests.

When we installed the ExpressPCI 3300, our Microsoft Windows 2000 Server installation started to crash during the boot process. We were puzzled by this behavior because, to avoid contamination, each HBA has its own copy of Windows 2000 Server. After a few frustrating minutes we called Atto support and found out that its adapter is set to BIOS boot mode at the factory, and the crashes were caused because the ExpressPCI 3300 and the internal Compaq Computer Corp. SCSI RAID controller in our server tried to occupy the same space at the same time. With that little problem solved, we proceeded to boot the system up and load the drivers.

Everything went fine, and the ExpressPCI 3300 put up some nice performance numbers, losing out to the QLA2300F only in the CPU utilization category. In fact, the ExpressPCI exhibited the highest CPU usage of any card on every category except for the maximum throughput test, where the Adaptec 9210LP had the higher utilization.

Like the QLogic QLA2300F, Atto's card does not support use in MD2 form factor machines, but with the amount of open space on Atto's clean design, that may come in the future.

ExpressPCI 3300, $1,695 with a one-year warranty. Available: Now. Atto Technology, (716) 691-1999; fax (716) 691-9353. www.attotech.com

Note: The letter grades printed in our October 1 issue for QLogic's and Atto Technology's products were incorrect. The correct grades are QLogic, B; Atto Technology, B. The numerical grades did not change.