I edited with a simpler question that might be more generic.

Keep in mind G41 were for very budget minded stuff. I have one of those board with this and this shows, but perfect for XP 32 bit where only needs 4GB.

Same idea with H81 too that we have currently in use and CMOS settings is limited and one of PWM connector is fixed, and had to use workaround using one PWM connector that works and Y connect two fans to this.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-06-02, 17:14:

Keep in mind G41 were for very budget minded stuff. I have one of those board with this and this shows, but perfect for XP 32 bit where only needs 4GB.

Same idea with H81 too that we have currently in use and CMOS settings is limited and one of PWM connector is fixed, and had to use workaround using one PWM connector that works and Y connect two fans to this.

Cheers,

Thanks for the answer. It'd be interesting if those were only bios limitations or whatever. In fact there're a very late 2016 bios upgrade but I don't suppose it would work with just two dimm sockets. I might try to find a single module and see if it works anyway but I expect not.

Keep in mind, the G41 chipset also came in DDR2 flavors and it's a budget part (compared to P45/Q45), and it has 8GB limit by design. So it's likely a chipset limitation, rather than a BIOS one.

8 Gb limit was specified for practically all chipsets, both for DDR2 and DDR3. 4 Gb modules weren't mainstream at that time. On practice, P43 and P45 can accept most 4 Gb DDR3 modules and some DDR2 modules.

The other problem is where the board wants to put it's PCIe memory mapped address space, some horrible old Dells stuck it in the 2GB to 4GB region, some brands that shoulda known better put it at 3.5GB tp 4GB, then when 8GB was expected, "Right above 8GB sounds great then, shouldn't give anyone any problems, 8GB ought to be enough for anyone" so even if you work around the limited banks and density problems, you end up running into the dumbass board not letting you for other braindead reasons.... unless you wanna rewrite the BIOS... maybe add some address lines because it was cheaper to leave off the ones that let you go higher...

computerguy08 wrote on 2021-06-02, 18:38:

Keep in mind, the G41 chipset also came in DDR2 flavors and it's a budget part (compared to P45/Q45), and it has 8GB limit by design. So it's likely a chipset limitation, rather than a BIOS one.

Agree ! The G41 was the most budget chipset of the *4x chipsets (Q43, B43, G45, G43, G41, P45, P43). It is basically an updated but crippled G35 chipset.
It only supported 1 DIMM per channel (even the G35 supported two) and one PCIe x16 but only Gen1 (the other *4x were PCIe Gen 2 and supported two DIMMS per channel except some G43 variants.
The max memory is a true chipset limitation of 8Gb like the G35 and other *4x chipsets.

G41 is limited to 4GB with DDR2 and 8GB DDR3, I did some research back in the day and found no evidence of anyone managing to overcome these limits...

G41 is fine, the memory performance should be as good as P35 when not using the IGP, and the IGP is GMA 4500 which while slow at least has WDDM1.1 drivers and the windows 10 UI performance is OK with super high CPU usage,

for overclocking sadly it only keeps PCIE locked until FSB around 343, so that was one of the main cons back in the day outside of the ram support being more limited,
oh and the southbridge used lacks AHCI

Hate to disagree but I have a Asus P5G41T-M and it is not "fine" by any good soc 775 standards. OK for a simple build but the limitations are just too many. Just my opinion.

Horun wrote on 2021-06-03, 00:54:

Hate to disagree but I have a Asus P5G41T-M and it is not "fine" by any good soc 775 standards. OK for a simple build but the limitations are just too many. Just my opinion.

from the standpoint of building a basic PC it's completely fine, by that I mean, you pretty much get the full performance of the CPU (excluding overclock)
obviously it's a low cost chipset normally used with very low cost boards, and some are better than others,

Asus P5G41T-M is still a budget board, 3 phase VRM; means no overclocking and is optimized for 65W CPUs, 2 slot memory, 2 internal USB for front panel. Rear i/o panel is decent. That about all.

My preference is more that. I had few flings with budget stuff in past and ran into many issues, mostly functionality ie: "do will this work? oh no that does not work" , performance "as in how much it can take using large tabs and many windows, handle a strong GPU, etc and ease of upgrading. Also available slots in optimum layout too.

Cheers,

If you ignore the dozens of s775 that can't take more than 2GB, or a conroe class, and those that can't take more than 4GB, or more than dual core, and those that can't take more than 4GB and only support up/down to 65nm cores, and ignore those that had hardware that has zero support under windows 8 or 10, and also ignore the ones that are DDR only, and ignore the ones that are DDR2, ignore the ones that are AGP and don't have PCIe, then yes, G41 boards are the lowest of the low, the absolute worst you can get for socket 775.

Exactly, but some cases this particular Asus is perfect for XP with 4GB if one don't mind the limited resources of ports and slots. But for 7 and 10, no, way too much for core 2 duo.

Cheers,

early 2000s I was going for mid to higher end boards (mostly for overclocking) at some point I lost my interest for that and started going for budget boards, I mostly had a decent time with the cheap boards,
coming from the 90s where cheap boards here were stuff of nightmares, really lacking in performance and stability ( thinking of you pc chips 598) it was sort of a revelation, it lacked features but performance and stability was there finally.

I realized that I mostly didn't use all the features anyway, and some of those higher end boards were also fairly unreliable;

I think I had the "popular" average enthusiast forum stuff, Abit NF7-s, DFI nf4 ultra, and then for a couple of years I went with some cheap ECS SiS boards and was impressed by them actually, after a couple of Asrocks with nforce 6100 (mixed, more to negative experience with those) I got this Gigabyte G31m-s2l which I was pretty solid, I used it for a few years and it still being used now 13 years later by my brother on his work PC (every single day this past year thanks to covid), I even had fun overclocking with that board, my early e5200 to almost 4GHz, even got a 65nm quad core Xeon (x3210) which would run fine at 2.8GHz stock volts but would shutdown due to overheating/overloaded VRMs at 3GHz overvolted I suppose (on prime95, on games it was OK),

I go back to what these boards are, very basic, this was like sub $50 new, and still works just fine, with performance (CPU, MEM, gaming..) right there with p35 at the same clocks at least, and super stable.

also on my office I still have even a PC with a gigabyte with 945GCM, some Intel with G41 and so on... these are daily use things for over a decade and have proven to be reliable.

it's up to your needs, I don't really need more than 2 front USBs, or 2 ram sticks for the most part (OK at this point it would be nice to take some of those over 4GB, but the 945 can only use 3.2 anyway!), or more than 2 PCIs and 1 PCIE on this sort of PC, the main thing that attracted me to better boards was always OC

for a retro gaming PC g31-g41 or whatever are completely fine choices, specially if you are lucky or select one of the better boards based on it.

Thanks for the many answers! 😀 I didn't even know until few days ago that so many other better chipsets existed.. I always tried DDR2 S775 mainboards with the usual G3x chipsets and I was thinking the G41 was one of the latest and instead I find is one of the cheapest.. I don't have faster newer mainboards functional right now so I was thinking to build a all in one linux-win old/modern machine and to get to 16GB would have been a good future proof feature so I registered on this my own old genuine retail boxed Win 8.1 o.s. but thinking twice I should have waited to find something more expandable. The Q9650 cpu sounds like a good upgrade compared to the E8600 I have but maybe I had too many expectations from such old config. It still might be interesting to try the 8GB modules anyway and expecting some miracles.. 😁 but I suppose it's impossible.

a Core 2 with 16GB of ram is a very rare sight, suppose you should be looking at p45 or x38/48 for that,

another thing I forgot to mention, high end 775 boards tend to be very power hungry, even in idle state, the g31/g41 ones are much better in that regard which is something that I always appreciated back then,

ok, let me just quote this from a 2007 review of a G31 board, I think it's to the point, if you didn't need the extra features, those boards were great to have because finally the cheap stuff was just as fast and stable, I think I'm a bit of a g31 fanboy.

"Budget budget budget. That's what comes to mind when you see this mainboard. No 4 DIMM slots are to be found, you get two. No Gigabit Ethernet, yet 100 Mbit. You do have HD audio, but not the connectors to use all channels. So from that point of view the ECS G31T-M mainboard looks a little... well may I say shoddy ? Well, don't let that idea fool you. If you can live with these handicaps then the ECS G31T-M most certainly will impress. Although I feel such features are a little outdated. The mainboard itself is extremely stable, but what is surprising is it's performing pretty much the same as a 200 bucks costing NVIDIA nFORCE 680 LT. Now surely that mainboard has a couple more features, but again, if you do not need the additional features then this mainboard will offer you pretty much the same performance experience and that's not bad for this kind of money."
https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/e ... ew,12.html

Well you can stick with Connie and Penny, but if you're after a good time for cheap and want to upgrade, then Ivy, Sandy, Hattie or maybe some other Broad will stick by your side longer, and aren't an expensive date these days.