Setting the motherboard up was no different from any other, bar the small differences created by the installation of a new chip, and the subsequent mounting of its cooling solution. Although, while dropping a processor in is as simple as dropping it into the socket and turning the screw, the mounting of a cooler is a touch more complex. After some fiddling with the backplane, it's a matter of screwing it down and plugging it in - just make sure that the cooler has full contact and stays level the whole way through, after all, it would be a shame to chip the die of your CPU. Beyond this point, the only other setup quirk will come from trying to remove the jumper blocks on the PCI-Express X16 slot, if you should happen to need to do so. While it can be done with a pair of tweezers, it's not exactly advisable.
Beyond the minor annoyances of setting it all up, there's the nature of what's bundled in with our motherboard to consider. Even though this isn't a premium product, Aopen made sure that all the necessary cabling would be included - that being a full complement of ribbon cables, as well as a pair of SATA cables and their respective power adaptors. Also included in the packaging is a I/O plate to hold the bundled IR receiver, and a dongle to connect the onboard S-Video and Composite to the outside world. With this all of course, comes the standard manual, a driver CD and a floppy which will be handy in the case that you decide on Serial ATA raid in opposition to normal operation.
