abit has done a fantastic job in the past with its packages; they’re colourful and with quite a bit of information. Even under the new Universal abit branding, the same quality comes from the company. The box is small since it’s only a Micro ATX board. There isn’t much reason to go overboard on using large boxes like some of the newer ATX boards come in. The front contains a bit of information on the board in regards to its CPU and chipset support. But like most packages, the info you really want is on the back.
Flipping the box over we see that the back has a lot more information, mostly marketing info but still informative none the less. While being a budget board, abit has included a colour photo in the top right hand corner that gives you a general idea on what you’re getting.
Being towards the more value end of the scale, there isn’t a huge amount of additional tidbits when it comes to the included extras, but all the major requirements are there. A layout sticker that can be placed on the inside of one of the case’s removable panels gives you a general layout of the board along with the location for all the headers, making it easier for you to locate them if you need to do any emergency maintenance later on. A small users manual that explains the setup, layout and basic features is also included along with a CD that has both XP and Vista drivers for both 32-bit and 64-bit OSs. The CD doesn’t include any Linux or Unix drivers, so if you’re an alternate OS user, you’re going to have to find them yourself. But for this chipset, good luck, it’s not easy. We did a bit of searching and couldn’t get one for the graphics driver anywhere.
Moving to the cables, we see a very scarce amount here. A single SATA data cable is included; so that’s one out of the four total ports covered. If you’re going to use a single SATA HDD and IDE CD drive, then you’re okay. If you go for a SATA DVD unit, watch out and make sure you have extra SATA cables or you are optical drive-less until you manage to get an extra. For the parallel cables, a single IDE cable with twp IDE ports is included and a FDD cable supporting a single drive also comes standard.
