Presentation, Bundle and Manual
If you're dropping £150 on a mainboard, you want the packaging to let you know you've spent big, the bundle has to impress and the manual better be easy to read.Presentation
The GA-8AENXP-D comes in a split box with mainboard and bundle in one side and hardware goodies in the other. In a thankful departure from mechanical animals and girls with footballs for breasts, Gigabyte get its crayons out and draws something tasteful and shiny on the front of the box. At least to my broken old eyes. Looks good for a mainboard box at the very least, I'm sure you'll agree.
Bundle
Open up the box above and you'll see that lots of your cash has gone on SerialATA data cables. Look.
There's four on top as you look at the box in that photo and other four underneath. Matching the SATA port count with cables is an absolute must in this reviewer's opinion, so it's nice to see Giga get it right and give you what you need. The manuals are in there (more on which soon), and there's an ATA ribbon, floppy ribbon, SATA power cable and software and driver CD. In the other side of the box you get the extra hardware goodies.
Gigabyte's GN-WPKG WiFi PCI card, which supports 802.11b and 802.11g, is in the box, along with the DPS module and an external SATA adaptor. Gigabyte doesn't miss anything out; even the CD for the wireless card is in there. It's everything needed to get the board up and running and connected to external peripherals.
Manuals
Easy to read, easy to navigate and concise are the buzzwords to describe then Gigabyte mainboard manual. The manual for the WiFi card is similarly good and the extra tome for the Sil3114 does the job. Read on to find out how it performs.