Package and Contents

In typical fashion we start off with the package that the board is shipped and sold in along with the extra goodies you get for your dollar. One thing about the J&W board was the packages artwork, or complete lack of I should say. Even ASRock and ECS has some form of artwork on the front of the box, but J&W only had the company logo, Intel's standard support logos and a few Intel chipset monograms on the front; that's it.

The back of the box was equally unimpressive; no marketing data for you to read. In all, a very disappointing start. Without a colour photo we can't see what we're buying; something we consider to be a big no-no in today's information age. We don't buy cars from the dealers without at least seeing a photo of them.

Thankfully the packaging doesn't seem to have been skimped on. With the documentation side of the contents there are two manuals; a quick install manual in blue and the standard users manual in black. The manual is a little thin but does get you through the install process adequately. The driver DVD contains Windows XP and Vista drivers for the 32-bit and 64-bit versions, but sadly for the alternate OS users there are no Linux drivers, so if you plan to go down this route, a huntin' you will go.

On the cables and accessories side of the equation, you get three internal SATA-II data cables along with two Molex to two SATA power converters (a total of four power ports) as well as a single eSATA data cable for good measure. When you work it out, you get half the amount of SATA data cables and half the amount of eSATA data cables that the board can support natively.

As far as ribbon cables go, you get a single FDD cable which supports a single drive and a single IDE cable that supports a master and slave device (two IDE drives). As for the rest, an I/O shield is needed for the ATX cases as J&W does not follow any standard ATX port placements (no company does anymore) and a single PCI cover bracket that has a single 6-pin FireWire port and two USB 2.0 ports for the onboard headers.