Bundle, Presentation and Manuals
ABIT have impressed recently with their motherboard bundles. You, more often than not, get nice black IDE ribbons, good manuals and all the extras needed to make use of the hardware the board provides. It was a disappointment therefore to see the AN7 bundle not going the extra mile. Maybe it was a packaging peculiarity and sample specific, but I was hoping for the black IDE ribbon treatment, USB and Firewire PCI plate ports and a bit of bundled software, over and above the standard stuff.
You get two seperate boxes inside the main, good looking box, one for manuals and the driver CD, the second for the cables and ATX I/O shield.
The manual collection is certainly slick. You get a main, multi-language manual for the board and BIOS, a quick start manual with just the essentials on getting things setup and a quick installation guide for just installing the board into a case. The 'quick' guides are simply extracts from the main manual, laid out in an easier to read format, but they are a nice touch. The obligatory quick start card, showing the board and the ATX case header pin layout, rounds things off.
The driver CD contains a semi-universal installer that attempts to ID your motherboard and only offer you suitable drivers and utilities to install. It seemed to work well during testing, although requirements mean I installed our stock driver kit and test utilities and applications, without using the CD too much.
The board accessories are limited to two SATA data cables, a single SATA power cable (with two heads), an IDE ribbon and floppy cable and the ATX I/O shield. It's that part of the bundle that disappoints most. The standout salmon coloured PCB, high-end feature set and attractive box and manual presentation means that the lack of effort with the board accessories isn't excusable. I'd want the other 2 USB2.0 ports and the other FireWire port at the very least, if I was buying AN7. You should too. Something akin to this lot would suit, since ABIT don't do a 'MAX' Socket A product.
At least ABIT don't skimp on the floppy disk needed to support the Sil3112 while installing your chosen operating system, something that's bitten me with recent K8T800 offerings from ASUS and Albatron.
