Presentation, Bundle and Manual
ABIT run with a tech-noir-like box art with the AA8 DuraMAX, with plenty of neon surrounding the inverted shot of the motherboard. The hooded µGuru man shows off those features while a feature box on the bottom right tells you that the board is an LGA775 board using Alderwood, supporting DDR-II and PCI Express.
The rear of the box is enthusiastic about the feature set and performance and you get multi-language translations of the important bits.
The bundle isn't too bad for their flagship mainboard product.
Inside the main box you'll find two inner boxes, layered on top of the mainboard compartment at the bottom. The first box contains the manuals and driver CD, complete with a floppy disk for installing a recent Windows operating system onto a range of ABIT's implemented SATA and disk controllers. The ICH6/R is fully supported.
The manuals are easy to read and the quickstart guide is most welcome. The crib sheet of jumper settings is also useful and you can never complain about its inclusion.
One floppy ribbon, one ATA ribbon, 4 SATA cables (although they're really short in this reviewer's opinion) and the I/O shield containing two USB2.0 ports and a pair of FireWire400 ports are what resides in the second box.
It's nice to see the quartet of SATA cables to match the capabilities of the board, with my only quibble being with their length. It would be nice to see cables of slightly varying length, each one slightly longer than the next, and definitely longer than the cables shipped currently, so that a stack of four disks in your case could use a (more) optimal cable to connect it to the mainboard.
Otherwise, the bundle is fine.