Package and Accessories

When it comes to package design there are two extremes. The first one is minimalism. Minimal design, minimal info, at best the product name is printed on some sticker on the side of the box, but sometimes the only way to find out what it is, is to actually open the package. Take, for example, the boxes from DFI mainboards or Thermalright coolers. To be fair I have to admit that these are pretty rare occasions. You will much more often come across computer components packaging that suffers from a different extreme: superfluous design. The company and model names are often lost against luxurious buxom ladies with all sorts of cold steel, fire arms or laser weapons; scary monsters, race cards or space ships. Extreme colors and fantastic themes seem more adequate for a toy store than for a computer one.

Luckily, Gigabyte Company managed to stay away from both extremes. The most important thing is still the info, while numerous photos and pictures do not distract, but serve their main purpose: illustrate the words. At the same time, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 package is still very colorful:

The company name, the name of the series and model number, the mainboard photo with highlighted key features, the list o supported technologies and a brief description of the most important ones, according to Gigabyte’s marketing department, - all this found its place on the Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 package. Everything is written in English, of course, but there is the same info in 16 other languages as well on one of the sides.

By the way, Gigabyte pays special attention to local documentation, too. You won’t find any weird sounding machine-translated texts – only well-written and grammatically correct wording. The number of languages they have Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 user’s manual in is really impressive:

Overall, Gigabyte’s effort here deserves the highest possible score. At least, the info on Gigabyte’s box will certainly keep you busy for a while.

As for the accessories bundle, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 doesn’t come with anything unusual. There are FDD and IDE cables, four Serial ATA cables with locks, I/O Shield for the case rear panel and a few stickers with Gigabyte logo:

By the way, note that one pair of SATA cables has an L-shaped connector, while another one – a regular straight connector. You can decide yourself which connector type is more convenient for you. I love it when they pay so much attention to the little things!

Besides, the bundle also includes a bracket with two eSATA ports and a four-pin power connector, a power cable with an adapter for SATA HDD and an eSATA cable.

All these devices allow connecting not only an external eSATA disk that usually uses its own individual power source, but also a regular SATA HDD.

The last in this accessories list is the mainboard user manual with a CD disk containing all drivers and utilities, a guide to Intel boxed cooler installation and a poster with brief assembly instructions in several languages:

You may get the impression that this is a not very rich accessories bundle, but if you look at the mainboard rear panel with all the ports and connectors a contemporary user might ever need, you will realize that there is nothing else you can actually wish for:

By the way, eight USB ports on the rear panel seems to be a sort of a record these days. With this extensive variety of ports, you do not need any additional brackets, trust me.

So, the mainboard package and accessories made a great impression and certainly score high. However, these are all secondary details that do not determine the final verdict really. So, let’s take a closer look at the Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard layout and features.