Sooner or later you will need to know the manufacturer and exact model of your motherboard, especially if you do plan to upgrade your computer, since the upgrade capabilities of your computer are set by the motherboard model you have. You will need to know this information if you need to perform a BIOS upgrade or download your motherboard manual or drivers. A BIOS upgrade is needed to make your computer to recognize a new CPU, and the manual is necessary if you want to check how much RAM your computer is able to recognize, for example.

Finding out this information is not so easy, because many manufacturers simply don�t print on the motherboard their name or the model name. Also, you may want to check if the motherboard installed in your PC is really the model you ordered. Usually the warranty is void if you open your computer, so you will need to learn how to find out this information without opening your PC.

How it is possible to know the motherboard manufacturer thru software? Inside the computer BIOS there is a serial number, which has includes a code for the manufacturer. So, what a hardware identification utility does is to read the BIOS serial number and to decipher it for you. Read our tutorial Deciphering the BIOS Serial Number for a detailed explanation on this subject.

We will teach you how to use three very popular hardware identification programs to find out your motherboard manufacturer and model: Sandra, Everest and Hwinfo (all available on our download section).

After you found out your motherboard manufacturer and model, you may want to know what is the manufacturer website and where you can download the latest BIOS, drivers and manual for your motherboard model. This can be found at http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/page/drivers_motherboard.