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The AK86-L comes with most modern requisites including SATA RAID, Gigabit Ethernet and 8 USB ports (4 available on the back I/O panel, 4 more available through motherboard headers. Unfortunately those are not included with the board). There are a few things that are missing notably the IDE ports not supporting RAID and the lack of Firewire.

The AK86-L is pretty bare bone as far as the bundle goes. A Quick Install Guide, a detailed user's manual and an EzRestore Guide make up the documentation for the board. As far as connectivity goes, there is the basic 80 Pin IDE cable, floppy drive cable, SATA Cable, and a SATA power adapter. The IDE and Floppy cable come in a snazzy black color like other AOpen motherboards but the SATA cable remains red. It would be preferable to see AOpen migrate to black SATA cables also to stick with their color theme more consistently. Also included is a driver disk for the SATA controller, a copy of Norton Anti Virus and a driver CD for the motherboard / onboard peripherals.

The inclusion of a virus scanner is a great idea point seeing the ridiculous number of viruses that are floating around in recent months but as far as other things go it is a bit on the slim side. The AK86-L supports SPDIF but includes no brackets nor does it include PCI USB slots. For end users with a lot of USB devices and does not have front USB ports this may be a concern as are those planning to output sound through a receiver. These are somewhat minor details and a bit of nitpicking but we've been spoiled with previous AOpen products (specifically the Max line) that included everything under the sink.

As with other products in AOpen's recent lineup, the excellent SilentTek makes an appearance. For those who are not familiar with SilentTek, it is a processor monitoring utility that adjusts fan speed to reduce noise which works very well. It kind of treads onto the realm of AMD's PowerNow! technology found on the Athlon 64 which makes me wonder if that's the reason why the AOpen does not support it either. PowerNow is a little different as it changes the voltage and clockspeed dynamically but does not change the fan speed. A combination of both SilentTek and PowerNow would be the ideal solution for a quiet computer, especially during non-intensive tasks and hopefully this will be something that will be implemented in the future. That said, hopefully AOpen will collaborate with AMD and implement both SilentTek and PowerNow! since they are complementing technologies that would no doubt benefit the end user.