Packaging

Typically for packaging, I’m just checking to see if there is anything special and if it will be sold in retail I want to confirm that any important information is there. But this time around we have to look at a completely different aspect. Normally with the exception of monitors and cases packaging needs to keep the product safe but it will be shipped in an additional box with even more padding. But for a full pre-built PC we actually have to worry about things getting banged around. Sometimes shipping with the video cards and sometimes the heatsink removed is best to keep things safe, but a customer that doesn’t want to build a PC isn’t going to want to put all of that back together. So the box for the Avant was HUGE and of course weighed a lot as well. It does have the AVADirect branding on the outside, so you will know to be excited for your new build when you see it out front.

For padding, they actually ship the build in the original case box with its foam padding. Then there are layers and layers of heavy duty air padding under and over that box as well as an accessory box up on top.

Then when you get the build out of the multiple boxes there is a paper attached with guidelines to check out before turning it all on. You have to get the side panel off to pull the expanded foam that they have filled the case with out then make sure there is no obvious damage. I love the foam idea because it fills in all of the gaps between hardware to make the PC solid and keep anything from moving around. The main focus is around the video cards, with water cooling there isn’t a lot of weight hanging off the CPU. I don’t know if our build was banged around, but if you look from the top down you can see that the foam didn’t really fill all the way out to the side panel like it should. As for damage, I did poke around the case and I didn’t see anything. Moving it around I did notice a sound though, as it turns out one of the zip ties for the lighting came loose and was sliding around.

I love the accessory box that your build ships with. It has the AVA branding and it tells you right on top that it is an accessory box. Basically, when you do a build you are going to have extra screws and cables, documentation and discs as well. AVA puts all of that together for you here. For our build, because it also had custom blue cables they shipped it with the extra blue cables as well as the full bag of the original black cables. The remote for the RGB lighting was in here and for some reason, we had two. Then all of the accessories that come with the motherboard and the two DVI to Displayport adapters for the two GTX 1080 Ti’s were also in there. If you have an older monitor you might need those. It's nice to know that AVA doesn’t just hang on to all of the extras, you get everything that isn’t used in your build.