Although ECS' past may try to shackle them as a 'Budget' vendor rather than a value one, (especially considering the low prices of their flagship motherboards), you'd be surprised just how much stuff is crammed on in to the retail box. From cables to adaptors, ECS has once again made sure that you've got everything you need to hook up everything inside your machine, and even tie it into your network. As such, the box's contents were as follows:
Software and Manual
- User Manual
- Extreme Driver CD
- Software Application Utility CD Ver.03
- ECS Extreme Case Badge
- I/O Shield
- Shunt Card Rev. 1
- Top Hat Flash Module
- Two screws for included brackets
Cables and Connectors
- Four short orange SATA Cables
- 2 IDE and 1 Floppy Cable
- 1 External SATA Bracket
- 1 dual drive SATA power adapter
- 1 USB/Firewire Backplane, with front mounting plate
- Parallel port backplane
- A 6' Ethernet Cable
Getting ourselves set up on the KA1-MVP Extreme was as uneventful as all should be - memory was dropped into appropriate slots, the Shunt card was installed in PCI-E 1, and the heatsink was tied down. Granted, heatsink installation was a little more frustrating then we would have liked, the blasted clips kept getting stuck between the Northbridge sink and the CPU retention bracket. Once we began spelunking into the bios, we were able to find all things necessary with relative ease, even stumbling across some interesting memory options which - believe it or not, worked. Once in windows (after a long haul through a fresh install), we proceeded to install the bundled drivers. Now, call me picky, but seeing the Yahoo toolbar included in the driver installation really made me wince. Although, when ticked to the off position, Yahoo went and merrily left us be. Problem solved. With the basic setup out of the way and trouble free (with overclocked memory on a stock CPU to boot!), it was time to get into the dark side of the build, overclocking like a mad hatter.
