Photos, The Box and Packaging

You guessed it, we're starting with the box. It looks like a motherboard box! Actually it looks a lot like the last ASRock Z77 board's box, different colors and no face though.

Not surprisingly the features listed are the same features that are on the official product page. I do like the layout of the box though, it appeals to me.

So does the carrying handle. As you may have noticed the box took a hit during shipping, hopefully the motherboard is alright!

Boxes can only hold my interest for so long before I feel obligated to open them. This can make holding deliveries for people rather awkward, but benefits you today as I'll stop talking about and looking at the box and open it up!

Parts! Lots of parts! I bet there is a motherboard under that cardboard...

Look at that, I was right! Nice looking, too. I'll torture you with an accessories shot before we take the board out of the bag and see if it survived the box being dropkicked.

In no special order we have:

• Rear IO plate, well marked.
• Driver DVD.
• Two manuals plus two pamphlets on how to set up the software.
• A hard PCB SLI bridge.
• Four SATA cables.
• One 3.5" bay USB3 thingie.
• One rear card slot plate that the USB3 thingie can bolt to.
• (Not pictured) One motherboard.

Now it's motherboard time, in the following (dark...) picture, look around the edges of the board:

FOAM! That's right, ASRock puts pretty solid foam not only under the board but around all the edges as well. This board survived the drop just fine, no issues at all. Do that to another companies high end board (you know, the ones with the viewing panel and cardboard surround) and you're looking at a board with broken bits.

So, a gold medal for ASRock's packaging here, it continues to be fantastic.  You can also see a couple interesting features in the shot above, a Molex connector near the top PCIe slot, and a mini-PCIe connector in the middle. We'll talk more about those in a bit.

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