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Asus includes quite an impressive bundle with this board:

What you get:

• five SATA cables
• three four pin to SATA power connector cables with 5 SATA outlets
• three slot covers with connectors
  • one with a serial port
  • one with a firewire port (should have been combined with serial cover)
  • one with a game port and two USB ports
• flexible SLI cable for nVidia cards
• long FM antenna
• wifi antenna
• two UDMA cables
• floppy cable
• S-Video/audio breakout cable
• PC motherboard backpanel cover
• USB IR receiver
• remote control
• batteries for remote
• WiFi / TV Tuner card
• motherboard user guide
• WiFi/TV card user guide
• motherboard driver CD
• WiFi/TV driver CD
• interVideo WinDVD Suite with:
  • PhotoAlbum 1.0
  • DVD Copy 2.5
  • WinDVD Creator 2
  • Disc Master 2.5

Whew. I was not kidding that there was a lot of stuff! There are enough cables for you to hook up five SATA drives, a DVD burner and an IDE drive.

The Board

The board is layed out quite well, with some very minor inconveniences if one were to be nitpicky. Placement of everything is reasonable and there's really little to complain about installation wise.

What I liked about the board layout:

• having both a PCIe 16x and 4x slot; potentially allows for NVIDIA SLI and ATI Crossfire if either eventually allow it on the 955 chipset
• external SATA connector
• passive chipset cooling
• firewire on the back panel
• dual ethernet on back panel
• SP-DIF and optical out on the back panel

The external SATA connection is promising. With SATA hot swap capability it could be a decent alternative to USB hard drives for data exchange.

What I did not like about the board layout:

• Awkward location for fifth internal SATA connector
• three power connectors for the motherboard
• two of the PCI slots are between the PCIe large slots likely at least one would be unusuable in a dual video card configuration

I was surprised to see the third (HD style) power connector on the board, before noticing the third connector, I thought I could use pretty much any ATX power supply with it.

The TV/WiFi Card

Unfortunately we do not have cable here at the office, so we did not test the card; but the feature set looked good. The meager documentation did not say if the board supported hardware MPEG-2 compression, so we suspect that the CPU will be responsible for compression, in which case a dual core processor would be an excellent choice for HTPC's based on this board.