I have been following this list for a while, and noted down the names of socketed motherboards. When I went to purchase one, they were all obsolete/unobtainable in the United Kingdom. The local computer shop is Linux friendly, so I asked them to find a motherboard with a socketed chip, and they suggested the above. At last I can try coreboot without soldering and switches.
The board comes with a ITE IT8716F 4MB chip; but that is compatible with SST49LF040A chips. I already have these and some SST49LF080A chips; just wish there were 160 or 320MB
The motherboard is electrically very similar to the Gigabyte M57SLI having a NVidea 570 SLI MCP(MCP55) chip set.
I have only had the machine 6 hours, have loaded Linux, and had a go at building and booting coreboot; must get more fall back chips before proceeding. My coreboot got as far as filo; but that could not find the disks; possibly because it is SATA. (Because the machine is so similar to a M57SLI, I just duplicate the directories using the names dfi for gigabyte and nf570sli for m57sli; copied the files, and did some minor editing for the name couplets).
I am going to add an IDE drive tomorrow, and start setting up systems properly. If anyone is interested in DFI machines, I can get more chips. Money is not a problem, so let me know if you need any of the above chips, and I can put in a bulk order and get discount.
Chris Lingard