Biostar TZ77XE4 Intel LGA1155 Preview

Packaging

The Biostar TZ77XE4 arrived on my doorstep in a new box design for Biostar, quite separate from the designs they used for products launched in 2011. The grey box is quite busy, with 20 technology logos on the bottom half surrounding the product name, which makes the "TOverclocker" logo across the top half of the box stand out even more than it would normally, looking like Thor's hammer come down to smite the competition. The rear of the box contains the standard brief desciptions of some of the technology present in the Biostar TZ77XE4, along with various certifications and previous awards along the bottom.


Upon opening the box I found the box goodies on top, separated from the board itself by a protective cardboard layer. The board below is wrapped nicely in my favorite type of anti-static bag, which allows easy inspection of the board without having to remove the bag.

Contents

The included goodies are:

• 1x PCB-based SLI bridge
• 1x Flexible Crossfire bridge
• 1x I/O Shield
• 1x User Manual
• 1x Biostar cable wrap
• 1x Driver CD
• 4x SATA 6 Gb/s cables with locking pins

The included goodies here are a bit meager, and those that have read my past motherboard reviews will remember that any high-end product, in my opinion, should have enough SATA cables for every port the board has, but we found only half that number here. Be that as it may, this is one of the many things that helps Biostar keep overall costs down, and not every user is going to need to populate every SATA port, so while this bugs me personally, it will be a bit more wallet-friendly.