A good inclusion of documentation. The Quick Users Guide Manual is pretty hefty, and does educate the user as to all the specifics and procedures for the MSI P6N SLI Platinum motherboard.

The two fold out pamphlets/posters are simple road maps for finding your way around the P6N SLI Platinum motherboard. Nothing I would ever hang on a wall mind you, but useful to have sprawled out on a table or desk during setup and assembly.  As for the driver CD, it comes with a few standards and some customary MSI software.

Drivers

MSI Utilities

NVIDIA Utilities

Basic Utilities

There's some other stuff too, but not much else worth mentioning. As for the included MSI Utilities, I'll drift over a few of them quickly.

DigiCell is nothing more than a really pretty version of the Windows Device Manager. Wow! DigiCell is telling me that I have an NVIDIA nFORCE network controller. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell me much else.

MSI LiveMonitor will automatically update MSI system drivers, MSI video drivers, and flash a new BIOS, all right from the desktop. Now to be perfectly honest, I've never gotten this to work properly in the past. But using it to upgrade the MSI P6N SLI Platinum BIOS was a snap. And everything it does are things I've been doing manually for years! You can too.

DualCoreCenter is a little desktop dashboard to display system speed, temperature status, how fast your fans are running and so on. There's also the one click option for on-the-fly OC settings which include Switch between a range of system speeds including Office, Gaming, AV (Home Theater PC viewing), Silence and Cool. It even brings up a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). That stays on the CD.

And finally, the System Monitor tool. From here we can check out clock speeds, temperatures, voltages and fan speeds. There is the option to increase FSB speeds, VCore voltages and so forth, but I'd rather reserve that for the low-level tweaking in the BIOS.

In short, all of these apps are pretty much useless, basically eye candy. Some work, others don't, and none really help that much.

Next on the list is the basic cables MSI tossed in with the P6N SLI Platinum motherboard. We'll start with the drive cables first.

The 4 SATA cables is good, one for every port. I would have preferred another ATA133 Parallel drive cable since there are two parallel ports on this board. And the floppy cable is a simple standard. The power adapters are good, but every recent power supply has SATA drive power connectors. 

The I/O Shield is standard. The SLI Bride is quite the standard nowadays. And the SLI Retention Bracket my not be totally necessary, but is nice to have. There are a couple of D-Brackets too.

Extra I/O's are always nice, but I really wish MSI could have gone the extra step and amalgamated all of these ports into one single D-Bracket, just to save expansion space.Hey, where's my mini IEEE1394 FireWire port? Guess I'll have to get an adapter cable. A notable aspect of the USB 2.0 bracket though, it employs an extra plug for another Pin Header on the motherboard. This extra header is meant to flash the four LEDs on the USB bracket to indicate different stages of USB activity. Pretty useless, especially since these lights will be living at the rear of your case, right where you can't see them.

The chipset fan is pretty cool (no pun intended), and could help to chill things down a bit. Running a quick test, I attached this little MSI branded fan to the North Bridge heat sink with the include thumb screws.

There's an AUX fan power connector on the board to plug into. Checking in the BIOS and with the included MSI System Temperature Monitor, I looked at the temperature readings with the fan powered on and with it powered off. A very quick accounting: the 1-2 Degrees Celsius difference was negligible, even during overclocking. Plus, this little fan is pretty loud.    

And I have yet to see any other motherboard manufacturer included an e-SATA Cable with their bundled hardware package. e-SATA Ports are quickly becoming a rear I/O standard, and having an e-SATA cable helps to future proof users looking to buy an e-SATA drive box.

So, all in all I'd have to say that the bundled hardware for the MSI P6N SLI Platinum is pretty good. The BIOS comes next.