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Foxconn is making it clear that they want to enter the performance segment with a bang. Their box design truly impressive, and attracts the eye like no other. And there is more to behold -- here's what we found in the package:

• 2x SATA cables
• 2x SATA power adapters
• 2x rounded 80-conductor IDE cables (there's only one IDE port on the board -- someone explain this?)
• 2-port USB bracket
• 2-port FireWire bracket (1 full, 1 mini)
• Rounded floppy cable
• Rear I/O shield
• User Manual
• Driver/application CD
• Foxconn Poster

This is a fairly decent bundle, if I do say so myself, but it's not without its oddities. It seems a little off-kilter to provide only two SATA cables when there are six ports to fill, and at the same time provide two identical IDE cables even though there's only one IDE port on the motherboard. The floppy cable is also double-headed, meaning that you can use two 3.5" floppy drives with it. The last time I ever had two floppy drives in my system was in the pre-Windows 95 days when I needed to break out some DISKCOPY love.

The rounded cables are built very nicely, and I guess the spare doesn't hurt. The poster is also a nice addition, though I probably won't be tacking it up on my wall anytime soon. One side sports a diagram of the mother board, showing you where all of the internal connectors and jumper pins are located. The other side has some screen shots of the BIOS, though these photos are deceptively simple in comparison to the actual BIOS.

The 975X7AA is a very nice board. The detail of engineering that has gone into its development is obvious. All of the internal headers and ports are well placed with ease of access. The heat sinks for the north and south bridges are look well-designed, though the north bridge fan looks like it could potentially be noisy.

There are quite a few low-profile and high-profile capacitors around the CPU socket, and while they're all positioned within the LGA775 specification (there were no problems installing a stock Intel heatsink), I can definitely foresee potential problems with over-sized heat sinks. Aesthetically, a mish-mash of different capacitors isn't as attractive as a uniform collection of low-profile hard-cased caps, but function is infinitely more important than form.

The application CD features not only the usual drivers, but also a few of Foxconn's own utilities -- specifically, "Fox LiveUpdate" and "FoxOne". Fox LiveUpdate is a simple application that allows you to update your BIOS right then and there from the Windows desktop, alleviating the need for a floppy drive. I really don't like fiddling with floppy drives.

The FoxOne Utility is also quite neat, allowing you to change a variety of clock/voltage also from the Windows desktop. You can tinker with the FSB, Vcore, PCI-E clock, fan speeds and temperature alarms. Having all of this control just a mouse click away is great, but in reality this is just a toy. Serious overclockers will always fiddle in the BIOS.

A nice little feature of the FoxOne Utility is the OS X widget-like status display. The FoxOne panel could be turned off, but a floating desktop widget would remain in its place, highlighting CPU and system temperatures, CPU frequency, Vcore, and CPU and system fan speeds.

In short, Foxconn has put lots of thought into both the actual motherboard and everything included with it. Things are looking good for the 975X7AA so far -- but will the BIOS keep us happy?