Starting off on the packaging, ECS’s bottom end boards come in the same white box with a blue tinge for Intel and Green or Red for AMD. The front of the box contains only very basic info such as the name and company logo.
The back gives you a bit more info on the features of the board as well as a colour photo of the actual board. This is very nice to see, even though this board is as basic as they come it still gives you a picture so you know what you’re getting. Some of the high-end boards our there don’t have any pictures so you’re left wondering what it has, definitely a big plus for ECS here.
ECS’s reading material and software for the board is no light weight. There is your standard users manual which gives you quite a bit of info on the board’s features, the BIOS setup as well as a basic run down of the extra software included. A quick install pamphlet is also included if you don’t want to wade though the pages looking for the header locations and front panel switch orientation, you can jump to this baby and get going in no time. The CD contains Windows XP 32-bit and 64-bit drivers as well as Vista 32-bit and 64-bit drivers. If you’re a Linux user, you’re going to have to hunt down drivers for this board as the CD is bare of the Linux support.
Being a basic board we weren’t expecting a huge cable bundle. You get got only a single SATA data cable and IDE cable along with the I/O shield. There were no power splitters so if your power supply doesn’t support SATA drives, out to the store you go.
