Popping the DC-390U2W into one of Sharky Extreme's eval-specific machines yielded a good look at the ease of usage Tekram has engineered into the card. Since the DC-390 is jumperless, and fully supports Plug and Play, a brainless monkey could handle the entire job without too much trouble. Just In case that monkey does indeed get stuck, Tekram has supplied an extensive yet easy to leaf through instruction manual which clearly describes the entire process start to finish. After going through the routine several times, we feel confident in recommending the DC-390U2W to even the pure SCSI novice, it's that easy.

Tekram supplies all necessary drivers for the adapter on a single 3.5" floppy disk. Win95/98 detected the card perfectly the first time we booted up, and after sucking on the driver disk a bit, the machine reported a totally clean and operational "go for launch".

Rebooting brought the joy that was intended by the first R&D team to ever conceive the initial "Plug and Play" concept, yet have seen the last eight years filled with hits and misses towards its overall success. On this occasion absolutely no screwing around in the System Properties or Windows registry was necessary to get the Tekram adapter fully locked and loaded.

Maybe there is hope for the future……

After running the DC-390U2W through some basic apps, we decided to test its full speed potential. Here's the rig we used, including the U2W Hard Drive that was connected to the adapter for all speed trials:

Intel Pentium 2-450 CPU
AOpen AX6BC 440BX Mainboard
Matrox Millenium G200 16MB AGP Video Card
Goldstar 128MB PC-100 SDRAM (Chip Part# GM72V66841CT-7J)
Tekram DC-390U2W SCSI Adapter
Seagate Cheetah 9LP 9.1GB U2WSCSI HD
Creative SB Live 3D PCI Sound Card
Toshiba 4.8x DVD-ROM Drive
Win95 OSR 2.1

Test Conditions and Specifications: All tests were run a total of three times with the results averaged to determine final score.

Speed thrills, that's for sure, and the numbers above are new all time highs for the Sharky Extreme Hardware Test Lab. Under all circumstances the Tekram DC-390U2W host adapter performed with lightning speed. It of course didn't hurt to have the adapter paired with one of Seagate's top of the line HDs either...