Open the box… oh its not open, ABIT have made a flap on the box so you can lift it up and actually see the components on the motherboard as well as the add in sound card this is surrounded by a pattern that I think is meant to resemble carbon fibre. This would be good in a retail environment, as it makes for good presentation, let’s get the box open properly and see what we have.

Inside the box there is two layers, the top layer is the motherboard and sound card in a box, this is protected by a see through plastic cover. Underneath that we have the accessories and manuals and any extras included in this model. Before we take a look at the motherboard itself let’s take a look in the accessories box and see what is included in the package.

The first box is full with the instruction manual, floppy and IDE cable, 6 Sata cables, Sata power connectors, a couple of sticker sets with the drifting logo set and two case badges. Also included was a rear breakout backplate.

As you can see this has the custom cutout for the Silent-OTES system, also in the box was this. That’s right external USB2 and Firewire B outputs for you at the rear of the case,

Its nice to see this starting to appear with motherboards, but who knows how long before we see most hardware with this option to make use of it. Another thing I noticed was the massive improvement with the Sata cables and the metal clipping system.

A much more useful and secure way of making a connector, wouldn’t you say? Time to open up the other box and see what we have in there.

This is the µGuru 3rd eye version of the AW8-Max so in the other box we have the second version of this handy device and as long as ABIT have not strayed from the original this should work well, a quick look through the Manual tells you that this version has skype and msn features added in so it will be interesting to see how they work. Let’s get the unit out of the box and take a closer look.

The clock has had a radical change, with the normal buttons placed on the front and skype buttons on the top of device.

This is connected to the motherboard via a connector on the rear of the clock, also at the side of the clock there was a mic and headphone port,

As you can see the µGuru Clock 2 is looking like it will provide some excellent features, here is a full list of the included accessories.

1 x µGuru clock v2 2 x SATA power cables converters 1 x 2ports USB2, 2xports IEEE1394B pci panel 1 x Rounded ATA 100 cable 6 x SATA II cables  1 x Rounded Floppy cable 1 x SPDIF fiber optic audio cable 3 x User’s Manual and Installation Guide 1 x Installation CD 2 x SATA RAID setup floppy 1 x Jumper settings sticker 1 x Custom back plate

Now we have had a look at all the accessories lets move onto the motherboard itself and see what we have.

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