A Better Look at Things

For some odd reason there are two versions of packaging for this motherboard, the one I have is a gold colored box, but I’ve seen a silver/blue colored box as well, but it’s the same board in it. Anyway the gold colored part is actually just a cardboard slip cover for the actual box, the slipcover of course has specs and features listed along with various other product information.

Opening the box we are greeted with all the accessories first,, including owners manual, driver/software CD, IDE/Floppy cables, I/O Plate, SATA cables, SATA power cables and USB and firewire PCI slot inserts.

The motherboard of course comes wrapped in an anti-static bag for protection, the board itself is a bright red color, with numerous other colors mixed in as parts of the board, it’s a colorful board to say the least.

The layout is fairly well done, and there’s quite a bit of room around the CPU socket so most any size CPU cooler should have no problem being installed. The Northbridge cooler isn’t too big, not as large as some others that I have seen, it’s skinny but the fan makes it a bit taller. The Front Panel connectors are color coded and in a spot that is very easy to reach which is nice, some motherboards have the connection is the oddest places.

The back panel doesn’t have much there but it does feature an e-SATA connection which is something you wouldn’t expect on a motherboard that’s inexpensive.