Coreboot Ported To Another Core 2 Era Motherboard: G41C-GS

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 13 May 2017 at 04:13 PM EDT. 5 Comments
HARDWARE
If you happen to have an ASRock G41C-GS still in use or tucked away in your closet, this older motherboard for Intel Core 2 CPUs now has support for Coreboot to free the proprietary BIOS of the motherboard. Or if you don't but still have other parts available, this motherboard is still available from a few online shops.

The ASRock G41C-GS may be an old motherboard with G41+ICH7 chipset for old Intel Core 2 processors, but surprisingly, you can still buy this motherboard new on Amazon for $83 USD if wanting to assemble a system that can be run using free software down to the firmware/BIOS. This motherboard has one PCI Express x16 slot, Serial ATA 2.0 ports, Gigabit LAN, and four USB 2.0 ports. There's also onboard VGA via the Intel GMA X4500 IGP. This is also one of the rare boards sporting both DDR2-800MHz and DDR3-1333MHz slots, albeit the DDR2/DDR3 memory cannot both be used simultaneously.

With this Coreboot commit the initial support for this ASRock G41 motherboard is now in place. An initial limitation though is it doesn't appear to initialize when using DDR3 memory but only DDR2. The motherboard BIOS flashing does work with the Flashrom utility to make things easier.

So if you have an older LGA-775 Intel CPU sitting around and looking to experiment with Coreboot, this ASRock motherboard is interesting given it can still be found new for less than $90 USD, compared to many other Coreboot desktop motherboard ports that tend to be for hardware still not readily available aside from used markets. If there's enough interest from premium subscribers / tippers I may be tempted to pick up this board myself for some Coreboot/Flashrom article on Phoronix as I should have some LGA-775 and DDR2 hardware still in the storage room.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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