Pushing into the thick of things we start on the package that the board comes in as well as the little extras that really determine a good overall product from a slap it together deal. GIGABYTE’s X48-DQ6 is part of the Dual Quad series which comes in an oversized box. Inside there is a plastic blister that encases the board for safe transport and underneath that is a cardboard box that contains the cables, manuals and accessories.
Flipping the box over, on the back there is a colour photo of the board itself with some pointers to the specific functions of the board as well as some info on the new DES or Dynamic Energy Saver software and hardware built into the board which we will give a little bit of info on later.
The accessories that the board is shipped with are quite impressive. Out of the total eight SATA ports the board supports, only four DATA cables are included. While there are a few cables lacking, the ones that are included are of good quality with locking tabs on them to prevent them coming out accidentally. The ribbon cables supplied are a single FDD cable with one FDD drive support and an IDE cable with two drive support.
Additionally since the board doesn’t have any e.SATA ports, GIGABYTE has given you a cheaters way of getting e.SATA which actually works out better in the end. One PCI cover bracket is included that has two e.SATA ports on them which run off two of the onboard SATA ports. If you want e.SATA you can divert any two ports to it, it doesn’t matter what controller they are on to run the e.SATA interface. If you don’t want e.SATA you can simply use all eight ports internally, however only six run of the ICH9R whilst two are run off the additional controller chip, thus an eight-drive RAID array is out of the question.
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