AX7A035B AX7A200B FPGA Dev Board & Kit with AMD Artix 7 XC7A35T 256MB DDR3 SDRAM 16 MB QSPI Flash Gigabit Ethernet HDMI Uart PCIe 2.0 Xilinx A7 35T 200T FPGA Development Board

I ordered this card, and it took only a couple of days to arrive to San Francisco, USA from Shanghai, China. In contrast to the advertised 6 weeks delivery lead time. Which is great.I think this is the best bang for the buck FPGA board deal that I was able to find which is: (1) under $1000 for the board; (2) actually very decently priced; (3) has a roomy FPGA on it and a decent selection of peripherals; (4) has a system-on-module form factor; and (5) is sold by a Xilinx partner company, and not a shady online outlet; and (6) is supported by the free Vivado license.*If* the board ends up actually working, it will be quite a boon. I understood that you might not want to buy from just any outlet, because those might use second hand FPGAs and have iffy support.The packaging said to contact a certain email address to obtain the board support package, software examples and schematics. When I contacted the email address, I was asked for an order number to be given access to documentation, and from then my repeated requests were met with silence. I only got the documents once I started playing hardball, and said I will reflect this into my Amazon review. But, in the end, after first getting docs for the wrong board, I got the promised support package.There seems to be quite a bit of material, which are translated from Chinese into English. The translation is far from ideal, but is understandable enough to be useful. All software is for Windows, which doesn't jive that well with my Linux dev platform. But I expected that and can accept it.The user documentation promises an active cooling fan would be included in the package. The sales brochure does not say so. So I wouldn't exactly hold this against the product. But you really need active cooling to be sure you don't melt your precious chip.It seems that you need to buy a fan separately. In this board's package, you get a teeny-tiny passive aluminium cooler only. I suspect this is by far not enough.Alinx FAN8060 seems a much safer bet, so I ordered it separately, but only after I realized it is not included in the package. Since it's a custom form factor fan, it seemed the most prudent to just order the fan from the board manufacturer rather than try to find one locally. This board has a supply source for the fan, and a thermometer connection, so I think that all should work well once all is put together.I was not able to find a comparable active cooling solution elsewhere, such that it's both available now, and fits the form factor.I have still not powered the board on, to be sure I don't fry the chip.4 stars because of the missing required active cooling, and the iffy documentation delivery. I might revise to 5 stars if in the end after everything said and done.