Presentation, Bundle and Manual
Hilariously, the product images taken for the PA1 MVP Extreme by this reviewer were all corrupt on a dying CompactFlash card, bar a shaky cam of the board itself. I'm therefore left describing the box and its contents to you without photographs to go along with it. Sorry about that and as soon as a new PA1 MVP Extreme makes its way into the HEXUS.labs we'll snap fresh shots and get them in here.
The box holding the board and all the bundled goodies is a big one, ECS separating out the internal box space into compartments for the board and bundled bits. Presentation is generally excellent; ECS resist the temptation to use some pneumatic space bint with clown breasts, or a heavily augmented dog with knives for teeth or some other such nonsense. Instead, muted but still attractive box artwork shows you what you're getting without going over the top.
The ATI Crossfire logo is very visible on the box and the compatibility with the major hardware components is well placed and easy to read. There'd be no confusing the PA1 MVP Extreme for an AMD mainboard or one that support DDR memory or AGP graphics. Clear and concise box labelling 'for the win', as all the cool young internet kids would say and ECS certainly win in that respect.
Inside the box you've got the board and the bundled bits. The board manual is excellent, ECS putting in obvious time and effort to get a good translation from the Chinese original. For a worldwide product that's incredibly important and to see some manufacturers still persist in shipping badly translated manuals in 2005 makes us wince.
The board has plenty of expansion capability so you're supplied with the extra headers needed to take advantage of USB and FireWire. SATA cables are plenty, ECS supplying four to get you going with the six ports on the mainboard. Two IDE cables and one floppy ribbon are supplied to round off the disk connectivity you can achieve out of the box.
Software wise, shipping retail boards to be available at the end of September will carry drivers to support the entirety of board features. As it happened, the first-one-off-the-boat nature of the PA1 MVP sample that HEXUS tested means that the CD wasn't quite equipped with everything needed but that'll be remedied for full retail stock. ECS have a nice graphical installer for board drivers and software that makes it very simple to get the hardware up and running with your chosen operating system.
