Asus P5LD2-VM Motherboard Review :: The Bundle

• ASUS P5LD2-VM Motherboard
• Back Plate
• IDE cable
• Floppy drive cable
• SATA cablex2
• 1 SATA power cable
• ASUS PC Probe II
• ASUS Update
• Adobe Acrobat Reader V5.0
• DirectX 9.0c
• Norton's Internet Security 2005

The P5LD2-VM comes with a minimum software bundle to help get you started. The inclusion of 2 SATA cables is ok, as there are only 4 SATA ports on the motherboard. More worrisome is the lack of a USB bracket, making the board support 4 out of the box, only. If you want to set up SATA drives, you'll need the F6 floppy disk. ASUS provides the drivers on the CD, requiring you to boot off the Drivers CD and create a floppy disk to get the required drivers.

Bundle

Utilities

Norton 2005

Drivers CD

Software bundles are important to me as a consumer. Often, a motherboard manufacturer will include anti-virus software, a hard drive partitioning software and more. ASUS includes a 90-day version of Nortons Internet Security 2005 with the P5DL2-VM. If you want to extend it you can purchase it from Nortons after the 90 days are up. The other software is mostly filler, like DirectX 9.0c and Adobe Acrobat 5. ASUS Update updates your drivers and BIOS in Windows.