Taking A Closer Look

- Packaging & Software Bundle

DFI are not known for including extravagant software bundles with their products, nor are they known for packaging their products in overly pretty boxes. The reasoning behind this is that DFI's main selling point for their products is that they are able to price them very well when compared to competing manufacturers. In my opinion, this is a fair trade-off and I'm sure most of you would rather have a lower price than having to pay extra money for software that you would most probably already own.

DFI's latest product, the NB76, follows this trend. The packaging is far from plain, however, it is not as fancy as what we have seen from other manufacturers in the past. That said, it definitely does its job and as long as the product arrives intact, who really cares what the box looks like?

The board we received directly from DFI was a very early retail sample, and the final package contents may differ slightly to what we have here. Inside our box was a driver CD, IDE & Floppy cables, a game port header for the onboard audio and an SC/MS/SD reader. There was no manual included with our sample, however, we have confirmed that one will be shipped with the final product. There was no extra software on the driver CD besides the chipset drivers.

A very thoughtful inclusion by DFI was a Smart Card/Memory Stick/SD Card reader. It slides into one of your 3 1/2" floppy bays and and can come in very handy. For example, if you have a digital camera with a memory stick and wanted to download pictures from the camera to your PC, all you have to do is slide the card into the reader and away you go!