Package and Accessories

Each mainboard review starts lately with the praise for the manufacturer’s due attention to proper packaging. Contemporary top-of-the-line mainboards from Asus and Gigabyte are protected against damages not with the common antistatic plastic bag, but with sturdy plastic casing shaped as the mainboard, and all accessories are put into neat compact boxes. This is a very good tendency and we should once again give due credit for it to abit Company, because they were the first ones to introduce it to the market. As far as I remember, in early 2002 I came across Abit BD7 mainboard on Intel 845D chipset that was sitting in a transparent plastic casing. Of course, the new abit IN9 32X-MAX Wi-Fi is also packaged very nicely:

The dragon-like creature and the slogan on the box promise that there is a real monster inside. The reverse side of the box contains details on the mainboard’s peculiarities, listed one by one and accompanied with appropriate illustrations:

Two separate boxes with accessories include the following items:

• “round” IDE and FDD cables;
• 6 Serial ATA cables;
• Retention bracket for graphics cards in SLI configuration;
• 2 wire clips for the fan;
• Additional bracket with two USB and two IEEE1394 ports;
• I/O Shield for the rear panel;
• User’s manual;
• uGuru guide;
• AirPace Wi-Fi manual;
• CD disk with drivers and utilities;
• Sticker with connector scheme.

The mainboard comes with abit AirPace Wi-Fi daughter card with PCI-E x1 interface and an antenna: