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The bundle goes a long way to completing the already pretty complete feature set of the K7NCR18G Pro. Due to ATX backplane space constraints, FireWire duties are ably handled by a 3-port FireWire card that unusually sits in the ACR slot, the first such ACR device I've come across. While I can't find any concrete details on the ACR specification and how it fits in with the accepted bus layout as I understand it, I presume the bus and connection to the MCP-T are able to handle the bandwidth of the 3 ports supplied by the Agere chip on the ACR FireWire card.
ACR FireWire card
It's a curious inclusion but one that makes sense if the ACR bus connection to the MCP-T bridge is sufficiently well endowed to handle such a high bandwidth serial bus such as FireWire. At least in the configuration shipped by Leadtek it doesn't eat up a PCI slot, although given the on board features, what would you realistically put in the 4 PCI slots to make needing one for your FireWire card a headache?
Along with what is possibly the first sighting of an ACR device in the wild (you decide if I'm joking) the box contains other goodies to get you going including a solitary ATA133 compatible 80-pin IDE cable. A pair would have been nice but it's not a show stopper. Floppy cable is obligatory. Apart from the driver CD, manual and the motherboard itself the only thing left in the box is the backplane header containing the 2nd 9-pin VGA DSUB output, the S-Video port (no supplied cable) and the coaxial digital output to give you discrete Dolby Digital output from the APU on the MCP-T.
Secondary VGA, digital audio and SVHS output
As far as software goes you get copied of Ulead Video Studio 6 SE DVD and Ulead Cool 3D. Video Studio is a decent introduction into video editing but can't match the power of something like Adobe Premiere and Cool 3D lets you generate some cool 3D graphics.
Let's take a look at the layout.
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