Foxconn G41S-K Value mATX LGA775 Core 2 Duo Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
876 words · ~4 min read
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Today I'll be unboxing a product that may not seem interesting at the outset.
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This is the Foxcon G41SK. It is an LG75
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CPU motherboard and it uses DDR2 RAM. So
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it's got a fairly bog standard set of features. Here is the full specs on the
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side. So it uses a G41 chipset. It supports up to 1333 front side bus. It
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has support for for PCI Express 16x. It has onboard video. It has six channel
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audio. So that's 7.1 audio gigabit LAN and SATA 2. So it's got basically
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everything you need for a super basic PC
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and it is tiny. So this is a microATX
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board. Bear that in mind. A microATX
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board, not a miniITX board, even though it is about the same size as one.
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And it's got pretty much everything you need to build a fully functional PC with
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just uh RAM, hard drive. Well, okay, you
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have to actually build a PC around it. But the thing that's interesting about
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it is for to me the size and the price. It's super cheap. Comes with an IO
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shield, a SATA cable, and then a Molex to SATA power adapter. It comes with
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some motherboard drivers and a quick installation guide. So, fairly basic
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accessory package, but that's what you'd expect from a board in this sort of
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price range, where really I haven't seen anything else in literally years. Okay,
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so here we've got the LGA 775 socket.
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We've got the power delivery system around the socket. We've got our four
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pin connector in its almost ideal location near the top left. And then
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we've got our 24 pin power in its ideal location on the far right. Now, you may
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have noticed already this is a super super basic board. You've got one one
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slot for DDR2 and that supports up to
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hopefully four gigs, although I'm kind of guessing here. Please leave a comment
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under the video for our viewers if you find out how much memory is supported in
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that one slot. You've got a PCI Express
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16x graphics slot, so you can actually install a full-size graphics card in
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this board if you wanted to. a PCIe 1X slot so you can put sort of one other
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expansion card in here, two SATA drive
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interfaces, and then you've got your front panel connectors, your onboard
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speaker header, you've got front panel audio here, you've got um
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hopefully there's a front USB header somewhere. Hold on a minute. Let me
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figure this out.
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Huh. I don't see. Oh, there they are. Okay,
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there you've got support for up to four more ports with front panel USB and
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you've also got some other pretty useful stuff like an IR header here. So, that
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would make this a great little media board. All right, so here on the back we
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find more mediacentric features. So, you've got digital audio out. That's a
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pretty good thing to have on such a value board. You've got two PS2 ports,
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one VGA out. So, I would recommend adding a graphics card if you are going
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to use this as a media center. Maybe something like an uh a low-end ATI HD
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5000 series like a 5450. That would be a
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great choice because with that you can do all of your decoding uh on the video
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card. You can put a low-end CPU in here, a little bit of RAM, you use your uh
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digital audio, and you've got yourself a heck of a little HTPC for super cheap.
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And then you've got four USB 2.0 0 ports, 1 GB Ethernet, and then uh
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apparently that's 7.1 audio somehow, but you won't be able to use a microphone
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while you're using uh those audio ports for 7.1 audio. Uh I hope I said this is
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Gigabit. And thank you for checking out my simple unboxing, I suppose, of the
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G41S-K from Foxcon. And then the last thing I
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wanted to do is just compare it really quickly against MiniITX.
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So this is a MiniITX board. You can see the miniITX board is actually only um
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like a centimeter and change shorter. And then in terms of width, the miniITX
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board is exactly the same width. So the only major difference is the positioning
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of the mounting holes. So you can see this top left one is the same. Okay, you
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can see the one over here is the same in this corner. And then where we start to
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run into differences is here. So, the miniITX board has one right under the IO
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uh the IO uh panel. And then this other
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board has actually no, that looks like it's in the same spot, too. Hold on a
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minute. Oh, well, there you go. Okay, so
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the only reason it's not miniITX is cuz it's not short enough. Then there you
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have it. Foxcon G41SK miniatx motherboard
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unboxing. Don't forget to subscribe to my video blog.