Inside the Box

Previous ABIT product boxes have been little more than a case to hold their goods with little info about the product or any pictures. Unless you have had a look at their stuff on the web or have an understanding computer store that will let you view it before you decide on it, you were going to have a hard time with guessing what you are getting.

ABIT's AN8-32X is packed in a green box with a colourful drawing on the front of the board setup in a SLI configuration.

The back is a different story. ABIT has put a bit more into its marketing and design of the box for the latest series of boards to come from their factories. On the back you get a look at the board as well as some technical specs of the features as well as what the board is able to achieve for SLI configurations - a far better way in the information age.

ABIT doesn't stop there; inside the box you get a rather broad range of accessories and documentation. ABIT provides three separate manuals. The most important is the instruction booklet on the board for setup, location of components and all the goodies that the ABIT board provides. The second manual is for the uGURU feature set under BIOS and Windows, explaining what these little extras give you. The final manual is a quick installation guide, if you don't want to wade thought the book to know all the ins and outs, this will get the more technical-minded up and going in minutes.

Next on the hit list is the software bundle. ABIT provides one CD and three floppy disks. The CD contains the Windows drivers as well as the uGURU software as well as the bundled Norton Antivirus software and other various goodies you may like to install. The first of the floppies contains the Windows 2000, XP and XP64 drivers for the Silicon Image 3132 controller chip as if you have your boot drive on this controller, you will need these drivers to make Windows detect it when installing. The second floppy comes with Windows XP and 2000 nVidia RAID drivers. The final disk comes with XP64 nVidia RAID drivers.

Lastly we come to the cable set. ABIT provides a healthy set with two IDE, one FDD and six SATA data cables. Included also is a SLI bridge connector, a PCI cover slot to hold the bridge in place if you transport your PC around, this will help prevent the bridge chip falling off. Lastly is the I/O shield plate, as ABIT uses a non-standard port layout to the ATX specifications.