Though it's difficult to tell from merely a photograph, this is a LARGE box. Compared to the standard clamshell box of the Gigabyte board we just reviewed, you can see the difference. The box is housed inside an external sleeve which slides off to reveal a clamshell type box. The reason it's so large, is because of all the things ECS generously packs inside. Believe you me, you will have no shortage of cabling with this board.

6 Serial ATA drive cables are included, as well as an E-SATA extension bracket to add another external SATA port to the rear of the case. This is along with the other E-SATA port built into the rear I/O panel, and they include an E-SATA cable. This cable is for connecting external SATA devices. It's noteworthy to mention that in both cases, E-SATA from the ICH8DH Southbridge, or the included JMicron B363 controller, both E-SATA ports allow RAID0 or RAID1 to be used with an external drive.

Standard IDE and Floppy ribbon cables are included as well, which should be a given. Another interesting thing included though, is an IDE-to-SATA bridge board, utilizing a JMicron 20330 controller. This handy dandy little appliance allows you to use an IDE device, such as a rom drive or hard drive on one of the SATA controllers.

An ethernet cable is thankfully provided, though like most geeks we have drawers full of these. A neat touch is an external rear bracket for 2 USB 2.0 ports and one Firewire port that also adapts to a handy included front 3.5” drive bay panel.

Naturally like most boards, the ECS PX1 Extreme comes with its own ATX backplate. Along with this, they still implement legacy ports like parallel but have the sense in this day and age to relegate something like this to a rear slot adaptor. Also, they include some spare power extension cables. One of these adds an additional 4-pin floppy header which is useful for the JMicron SATA bridge board, and another which adds an additional 2 SATA power adaptors in case you might need them.

The included manual is unusual in being a horizontally oriented flip book. Still, it's a very good and concise manual, one of the best we have seen and lacking any odd translation issues. They also throw in a neat little foldout poster which points out all of the gee-wiz features of the board. The two software CD's consist of one driver CD containing all of the boards needed drivers, and an applications CD. The applications included are DPU Backup, ProMagic Plus Data Recovery, Showshifter DVR, I'm Intouch Remote Access, MediaRing VOIP, and WinCinema DVD.

Now that we've gotten the huge pile of extra goodies out of the way, it's time to take a look at the board itself.