Bundle and presentation
This is ABIT's top-of-the-line consumer S478 motherboard, You'd expect it to be presented and packaged well, especially in view of its £150+ retail price. Let's have a peek.
Speed, stability, and power ?. We certainly hope so as we'll be putting these attributes to the test.
Yum, lots of features. About the only feature conspicuous by its absence is IDE RAID. We have pretty much all the other bases covered here.
This is just a personal point but we do love the presentation of this board. The manuals, driver CD, floppy S-ATA drivers and I/O shield arrive in a wallet-like affair. We've seen literally hundreds of motherboards pass through the labs; this is the first time that I've personally seen this attention to detail.
A little difficult to pick out the key extras here. Again, they're presented in a separate box. Twin S-ATA cables and power connectors give you immediate S-ATA usage. Rounded ATA cables are a nice touch. If you really want to use S-ATA from your standard IDE drive, ABIT continue to bundle their Serillel converter, which is thoughtful. The central white bracket deserves some mention.
Rather than have a couple of brackets, ABIT use a single bracket for both USB2.0/1.1 and FireWire duties. Because the headers are located close to each other near the ICH5/R there's no problem in hooking up this bracket easily and quickly. A decent bundle and decent presentation.
