Package and Contents

First off, we start as normal with the package and contents. The box that Sapphire ships the board to the retail channel in is a black and green number with the company logo and the board model number shown on the front.

On the back of the box Sapphire puts a colour photo of the board which is very impressive. This gives Sapphire some very big brownie points in our book. Along with the pictures, there is a small amount of marketing info on the board.

Sapphire's software and documentation is rather light; however, while it feels thin, it's got all the info on the board, BIOS and software that is supplied on the DVD which has drivers and applications for both Vista and XP in 32-bit and 64-bit variants, whilst also including some overclocking software from AMD in the form of AMD Overdrive.

If the documentation and software seemed light, the accessories are definitely. There are two SATA data cables out of a total of six that the board supports, one molex to SATA power converter and a single IDE cable. And that's all she wrote.

This is something we have seen before on the Jetway combo board. This switch card is used to split the PCIe x16 lanes. If you want to use a single PCIe x16 card you put this card into the lower x16 slot; when this is done all 16 lanes are diverted to the top slot. When the card is removed, 8 lanes are taken from the top slot and diverted to the lower slot, giving an 8/8 setup.