The bundle is safely stored in a white carton box. We knew what we're expecting from the bundle and got just about what we expected, given the fact that the crazy Quad-Triple phase thing was already on the motherboard (anyone remembers additional PVM cards that Gigabyte used to supply with high-end mobos?). User's manual and additional guides, SLI connector, ten Serial ATA cables (four Serial ATA II, two eSATA 2), two Serial ATA power adapters, Parallel ATA & floppy cable, Gigabyte stickers and two additional USB/audio/Firewire headers. Quite nice.
We actually ran into a few problems with Driver CD supplied with the motherboard but we solved these quite easily by using Gigabyte's web page. Also, we had a problem with one of the integrated circuts hanging loose from the motherboard, which didn't really matter to the motherboard since it worked flawlessly even with that. Say again: Flawlessly. It seems that lately we've been constantly playing around with motherboards that are missing some parts, like the DFI's Infinity board CeBIT review (three capacitors were missing). Nevertheless, this looks like a problem in transport and nothing else. We might add that this is a very wrong place to put any kind of chips, but even with this, it seems better then the reference design's electronics being below the CPU socket...
Testing setup
We used our standard testing system for this motherboard:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
- OCZ's Platinum PC2-8000 memory
- OCZ's GameXstream Power Supply unit
- Western Digital RaptorX
- ASUS's EN7900GTX
- Zalman's CNPS9700
