Bundle and presentation
Presentation is where it's at right now. No more boring brown boxes for premium boards.
The accompanying bundle may be subject to a revision. The sample carried a single rounded ATA133 cable and matching floppy cable. A couple of SATA cables should and may be bumped up to 6 by the time the P4N Diamond hits the shops. Anything less would be stingy on MSI's part. An eSATA extender cable, once mounted over a PCI slot, allows you to attach an external SATA drive, usually housed in an enclosure, for on-the-fly connectivity. My only concern is that the use of twin VGA cards already puts PCI slot space at a premium. MSI will bundle in a regular manual in production models. There's an entire CD devoted to the Creative sound card, which contains drivers and the versatile MediaSource software. Of course, MSI bundles in a bridge connector for SLI lovin'.
As is the MSI way, it's brackets galore. The above two support 2 USB2.0 and 2 FireWire400 ports, the latter being offered in 6-pin and 4-pin flavours. Again, the problem arises of where you would mount them when twin VGA cards are installed inside a regular case. It's a difficult one to get around, unfortunately. Please note that there's an option two-in-one Bluetooth/WLAN card that's available in another bundle. It'll plug into a spare PCI slot and serve up wireless connectivity from an accompanying dongle.
