The Box and Goodies -
Gigabyte has made some great strides in changing their style. It was not that long ago that they were putting out boring old boxes with that terrible reflective coating on it. Now they are making boxes that, if not good looking, are at least easy to look at and read. They have gone a little overboard on the marketing on the front of this box though. The largest logo on the box is the TouchBIOS logo; this is what they are calling the newest version of the EFI BIOS these days.  Oddly enough though, the one thing I would have expected to be prominent on the box is almost hidden. This is the Virtu GPU Virtualization technology from Lucid.  We saw a demo of this at CES and it was quite impressive.  But that is not the only feature that is almost hidden; there is the Intel Smart Response technology, an audio CODEC that is capable of 108db signal to noise ratio for Blu-Ray playback, and support for three terabyte and above hard drives.

The back of the box is even more detailed (pronounce that chaotic) than the front. It has a lot to take in (be happy there is no reflective coating). We have already covered most of the high lights on the front of the box but there are a couple of items that we want to point out. Up at the top of the box there is a small logo showing off the Intersil VRD12 power controller along with a Display Port logo down towards the bottom. Of course there is more, but we will let you have the joy of hunting around the box to find it all.

When we open the box up things look rather empty. I mean you get the things you need to get going; four SATA cables, an SLI bridge, I/O shield, drivers/utility DVD and the usual manuals (don’t forget the stickers).