Today I'll be unboxing a product that may not seem interesting at the outset.
This is the Foxcon G41SK. It is an LG75
CPU motherboard and it uses DDR2 RAM. So
it's got a fairly bog standard set of features. Here is the full specs on the
side. So it uses a G41 chipset. It supports up to 1333 front side bus. It
has support for for PCI Express 16x. It has onboard video. It has six channel
audio. So that's 7.1 audio gigabit LAN and SATA 2. So it's got basically
everything you need for a super basic PC
and it is tiny. So this is a microATX
board. Bear that in mind. A microATX
board, not a miniITX board, even though it is about the same size as one.
And it's got pretty much everything you need to build a fully functional PC with
just uh RAM, hard drive. Well, okay, you
have to actually build a PC around it. But the thing that's interesting about
it is for to me the size and the price. It's super cheap. Comes with an IO
shield, a SATA cable, and then a Molex to SATA power adapter. It comes with
some motherboard drivers and a quick installation guide. So, fairly basic
accessory package, but that's what you'd expect from a board in this sort of
price range, where really I haven't seen anything else in literally years. Okay,
so here we've got the LGA 775 socket.
We've got the power delivery system around the socket. We've got our four
pin connector in its almost ideal location near the top left. And then
we've got our 24 pin power in its ideal location on the far right. Now, you may
have noticed already this is a super super basic board. You've got one one
slot for DDR2 and that supports up to
hopefully four gigs, although I'm kind of guessing here. Please leave a comment
under the video for our viewers if you find out how much memory is supported in
that one slot. You've got a PCI Express
16x graphics slot, so you can actually install a full-size graphics card in
this board if you wanted to. a PCIe 1X slot so you can put sort of one other
expansion card in here, two SATA drive
interfaces, and then you've got your front panel connectors, your onboard
speaker header, you've got front panel audio here, you've got um
hopefully there's a front USB header somewhere. Hold on a minute. Let me
figure this out.
Huh. I don't see. Oh, there they are. Okay,
there you've got support for up to four more ports with front panel USB and
you've also got some other pretty useful stuff like an IR header here. So, that
would make this a great little media board. All right, so here on the back we
find more mediacentric features. So, you've got digital audio out. That's a
pretty good thing to have on such a value board. You've got two PS2 ports,
one VGA out. So, I would recommend adding a graphics card if you are going
to use this as a media center. Maybe something like an uh a low-end ATI HD
5000 series like a 5450. That would be a
great choice because with that you can do all of your decoding uh on the video
card. You can put a low-end CPU in here, a little bit of RAM, you use your uh
digital audio, and you've got yourself a heck of a little HTPC for super cheap.
And then you've got four USB 2.0 0 ports, 1 GB Ethernet, and then uh
apparently that's 7.1 audio somehow, but you won't be able to use a microphone
while you're using uh those audio ports for 7.1 audio. Uh I hope I said this is
Gigabit. And thank you for checking out my simple unboxing, I suppose, of the
G41S-K from Foxcon. And then the last thing I
wanted to do is just compare it really quickly against MiniITX.
So this is a MiniITX board. You can see the miniITX board is actually only um
like a centimeter and change shorter. And then in terms of width, the miniITX
board is exactly the same width. So the only major difference is the positioning
of the mounting holes. So you can see this top left one is the same. Okay, you
can see the one over here is the same in this corner. And then where we start to
run into differences is here. So, the miniITX board has one right under the IO
uh the IO uh panel. And then this other
board has actually no, that looks like it's in the same spot, too. Hold on a
minute. Oh, well, there you go. Okay, so
the only reason it's not miniITX is cuz it's not short enough. Then there you
have it. Foxcon G41SK miniatx motherboard
unboxing. Don't forget to subscribe to my video blog.