The retail price for the package is not yet known, but we estimate it to be around €110:

Below is a photo of what's included in the retail package.

To sum it up, the retail package includes:

• The board itself
• 2x SataII power cables
• 2x SataII cables
• 2x IDE ATA100 cables
• 1x Floppy cable
• 1x SLI Bridge (!)
• 1x backpanel
• 1x CD-ROM with drivers
• 1x printed users manual
• 1x printer quick installation guide

It is very strange that an SLI adaptor is bulked with the Foxconn P9657AB. The board supports (officially) Crossfire, but we all know that with "hacked" Nvidia drivers, SLI can be supported on Crossfire enabled motherboards, even if with reduced performance, since only Nvidia based boards have 2x PCIe 16x slots. The board itself is well layed out and all parts can be identified easily:

Let's zoom in on the CPU area.

The board is designated as "Vista Ready", meaning that Foxconn has drivers for all components under Windows Vista. Any nearby components are low profile so there shouldn't be any difficulty when installing larger 3rd party cooling solutions. The northbridge use a passive heatsink.

The motherboard has four banks for the memory modules with a total memory capacity of 8GB (4x 2GB). The colour coding indicates which memory banks to use for dual channel operation:

Moving to the southbridge on the board, we can see again a passive heatsink in use and the 6x SATA 2 connections. Also present are IDE and Floppy connections:

The board supports 2x PCI-E slots that can be used for Crossfire setup (run x16 + x4 mode, support dual graphics card technology). There are several I/O internal slots available for extra USB, Front Panel connectors, however these are not included in the retail package. The back I/O panel has the usual connections:

• 1x Parallel port
• 1x Serial port (COM 1)
• 1x PS/2 keyboard port
• 1x PS/2 mouse port
• 1x S/PDIF Fibre out
• 1x S/PDIF Coaxial out optional
• 1x audio jack supports 5 jacks
• 4x USB 2.0 ports
• 1x RJ45 LAN jack
• 1x External SATA Port