Photos, The Box and The Motherboard

The box, as usual, is first.

Not surprisingly the box lists a lot of the features we already checked out in the previous pages. There's also some dude's face on the front, I'm assuming that's Fatal1ty.

I have to say that I have my doubts about the 5/5/5 speed thing, 5x lower latency is bordering on impossible on many servers due to lightspeed limiting things. I'm down with better performance, but this looks like ASRock working to trump Gigabyte's 333 business with higher numbers. The proof is in the pudding as they say. Why they say that is beyond me really, I don't generally expect to find answers when I eat pudding. We'll open the box, maybe there are answers in there. Or pudding.

No pudding. No answers. Lots of accessories though.

A couple manuals, six SATA cables, two Molex to SATA power adapters (really?), a rear IO plate, a hard PCB SLI bridge, a USB3 3.5" bay adapter and a bracket to mount the USB3 ports in the rear PCIe case slot opening things. Whatever they're called. Also some instructions on setting up the 555 business and Virtu MVP. All together a nice complete accessories kit, I'm especially happy to see the USB3 header. Molex to SATA bridges seem rather outdated, I'd hope that anybody with the money to buy a top end Z77 motherboard can afford a vaguely modern PSU that has SATA power plugs.

Unsurprisingly there is a motherboard under the white cardboard tray thing.

Shiny! Can't see much though. I'll let the cat out of the bag. Or the motherboard at least.

I see two things here:

1. An awfully snazzy looking motherboard.
2. The best motherboard packaging I have ever seen, bar none.

That's right folks, ASRock just won the coveted Funkykit.com Best Mobo Packaging Ever award, whatever it might be.

Foam on the sides is revolutionary and very, very nice to see. It is a far cry from some other companies that use the same color scheme and ship with cardboard on the sides. Cardboard that tends to rip parts off the motherboard. I am very happy with ASRock right now. If they can keep this up during inspections and testing this board is in for a very good score.

Now that the motherboard has been seen, we'll look at it a bit more closely on the next page.

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