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Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 10:55:24 -0700 (MST)
From: Brian Handy <handy@condor.physics.montana.edu>
To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Recommendations for SCSI card?
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Arrgh!  I'm trying to follow this discussion and getting completely shut 
down.  Too many part numbers, BIOS names and MB manufacturers have been 
bantered about and I've gotten completely lost.

I'm also about to put together a couple of systems.  I'm sort of planning 
on a P-100 with some sort of SCSI; the onboard NCR was highly recommended 
to me as inexpensive and quite sufficient for my needs.

Now...Larry just recapped things with the following:

>[...]
> People constantly say that the best inexpensive PCI SCSI busmastering
> cards are those using the NCR 53C810 (or whatever the part number is),
> but even there, your're best advised to buy an original NCR card:
> Symbios Logic PCI Host Bus Adapter SYM8150S (with BIOS)
>                         or         SYM8100S (without BIOS, for MBs
>                                                 with the SDMS bios)
>[...]

These part numbers are lost on me.  I've been trying to get an ASUS MB 
*and* get the NCR on-board SCSI.  I've heard arguments about how the BIOS 
won't deal with it and I'll have to boot off a floppy, and (sigh) I even 
had a dealer tell me I couldn't do it.

At the same time...if I look at the ASUS www page, I see that the 
PCI-SC2000 controller comes with the following claim:

			"Works with ANY ASUS Mb."

Now, I wanted 512KB cache w/ Pipeline burst.  I don't know if that's 
somehow the cause of my problems.

To wrap things up...can someone explain to me where I'm completely off in
left field?  basically, how do I solve this problem and get a nice MB with
the cheap SCSI interface? 

Thanks for your help, and THANKS for your patience.

Brian