How to Check Your Motherboard Model Number on Your Windows PC
Posted by Julia Werner •
Find Motherboard Model in Linux
In Windows, you can see information about the motherboard installed in your PC using various GUI tools. In Linux, there are no such tools installed out of the box. While you can install some of them to get motherboard information, there is a single console command you can issue and get your motherboard model and other details instantly.
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There is a special console tool dmidecode which utilizes sysfs to provide information about your motherboard. Here is a brief description of the tool taken from its man page.
dmidecode is a tool for dumping a computer's DMI (some say SMBIOS) table contents in a human-readable format. This table contains a description of the system's hardware components, as well as other useful pieces of information such as serial numbers and BIOS revision. Thanks to this table, you can retrieve this information without having to probe for the actual hardware. While this is a good point in terms of report speed and safeness, this also makes the presented information possibly unreliable. The DMI table doesn't only describe what the system is currently made of, it also can report the possible evolutions (such as the fastest supported CPU or the maximal amount of memory supported). SMBIOS stands for System Management BIOS, while DMI stands for Desktop Management Interface. Both standards are tightly related and developed by the DMTF (Desktop Management Task Force). As you run it, dmidecode will try to locate the DMI table. It will first try to read the DMI table from sysfs, and next try reading directly from memory if sysfs access failed. If dmidecode succeeds in locating a valid DMI table, it will then parse this table and display a list of records like this one: Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 8 bytes.
Base Board Information Manufacturer: Intel
Product Name: C440GX+
Version: 727281-001
Serial Number: INCY92700942 Each record has: A handle. This is a unique identifier, which allows records to reference each other. For example, processor records usually reference cache memory records using their handles. A type. The SMBIOS specification defines different types of elements a computer can be made of. In this example, the type is 2, which means that the record contains "Base Board Information". A size. Each record has a 4-byte header (2 for the handle, 1 for the type, 1 for the size), the rest is used by the record data. This value doesn't take text strings into account (these are placed at the end of the record), so the actual length of the record may be (and is often) greater than the displayed value. Decoded values. The information presented of course depends on the type of record. Here, we learn about the board's manufacturer, model, version and serial number.
To find the motherboard model in Linux, do the following.
Open a root terminal. Type the following command to get the brief information about your motherboard: dmidecode -t 2 The output will be like this: To get more details about your motherboard information, type or copy-paste the following command as root: dmidecode -t baseboard See the following screenshot:
The -t argument filters the output by the specified DMI type. 2 means 'Baseboard'.
When you are using the 'baseboard' option for the -t argument, it uses a combination of DMI types (as SMBIOS specification defines), so you see more details.
Type man dmidecode to learn more about its command line argument.
That's it.
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How to Check Your Motherboard Model Number on Your Windows PC
Whether you need to update drivers, check hardware compatibility, or you’re just curious, it’s way easier to check your motherboard model number with these simple tricks than to crack open your case to check the board itself. Here’s how to check your motherboard model number from the comfort of your keyboard.
Why Do I Want To Do This?
Knowing your motherboard’s model number is important if you’re thinking of upgrading your drivers, buying new hardware (you’ll need the proper expansion or memory slots, for example), or just checking the capabilities of your board if you’re considering upgrading your whole rig.
If you kept the paperwork that came with your computer (or the individual components, if you built it yourself), you can often times reference that. Even then, it’s best to check to make sure the documentation is correct. Rather than open the case and search for the model number on the board itself, use tools within Windows to check things out instead.
Check Your Model Number from the Command Prompt (or PowerShell)
If you’re comfortable using the Command Prompt (or PowerShell, where these commands also work), you can easily check a variety of motherboard and hardware stats using the handy Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC)—a command-line interface for Microsoft’s powerful WMI tool.
With the WMIC, you can entry the query baseboard to check motherboard stats, and then use additional modifiers like get Manufacturer, Model, Name, PartNumber, slotlayout, serialnumber, or poweredon to get more detailed information about the motherboard.
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As an example, let’s check a motherboard’s manufacturer, model number, and serial number using WMIC.
Open up the command prompt in Windows via either the run dialog (Windows+R) or by searching for “cmd” on the Start menu—no need to run the Command Prompt as an administrator. And, as we mentioned, you could also use PowerShell here, if you prefer. The command works the same in both shells. At the command line, type the following text (noting that there are no spaces between the modifiers—just commas), and then hit Enter:
wmic baseboard get product,Manufacturer,version,serialnumber
The information returned checks out for the motherboard we’re using: the manufacturer is Gigabyte, the board is the Z170X-Gaming 7, and while the WMIC tool tried to check the serial number, Gigabyte left that particular bit unfilled for whatever reason. Nonetheless, the WMIC tool functioned just as it should, and without opening the case or using any third party tools, we have the basic information we’re looking for.
Check Your Model Number with Speccy
If you’d prefer a GUI-based way to check your motherboard’s model number (as well as a method that yields more information at a glance than the WMIC tool), you can grab the free tool Speccy. It’s a handy app to have around.
After downloading and installing Speccy, go ahead and fire it up.
You can see the motherboard model number right on the summary page, along with it’s current operating temperature (assuming your board includes that). You can also see basic details about other system components.
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Click over to the “Motherboard” tab on the left to see even more information about your motherboard, including details about the chipset and voltages, along with the types of slots included on the board and whether or not they’re currently in use.
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