Inside the Box - Continued

Moving along to the cable bundle, ASUS has a huge array here. There are a total of six SATA data cables included and considering the board has only six SATA ports, this means you don't have to buy any extra cables if you want to run all of the ports from day one. Along with those, you get a single IDE cable with two-drive support. You may have noticed two weird looking yellow SATA-ish looking cables as well. These are actually SAS sables; one end has a SATA port connector while the other has a combo SAS/Power port that connects to the drive (SAS uses a different port on the back of the drive for connection, so standard SATA cables won't connect to a SAS drive).

ASUS provides a single PCI expansion cover bracket which has two USB 2.0 ports on it along with a single 4-pin FireWire port. Along with this is a Vortec air cooler. This is used if you plan to move to water cooling on your board; it'll help keep the Mosfets cool. Since the air from the CPU fan has been eliminated when a liquid cooling setup is used, an alternate source of air is needed to blow over the heat-pipe and this baby does the job nicely.

This is one of the more interesting things we have seen and ASUS calls it the OC Palm. What this baby does is everything; well, almost. It's an overclocking tool that allows you to monitor in real time as well as manipulate FSB speed, voltages, CPU multipliers and pretty much anything you can do in the BIOS. To overclock and monitor the CPU, you can do it on this little colour display. It connects to the PC via a spare USB port and gives you readouts on everything that's going on with your overclock.