How to get motherboard vendor information?

[~]

Is there a reliable way (using a BIOS service, PCI, etc.) to get a unique identifier or string for a motherboard model, or would it be useless?

[Brendan]

Hi,

Is there a reliable way (using a BIOS service, PCI, etc.) to get a unique identifier or string for a motherboard model, or would it be useless?

You can try to use SMBIOS.

It's not entirely reliable though - on some (mostly old) computers it's not supported, and on some computers it's dodgy (e.g. the motherboard model ID might be "to be filled in by OEM", literally), and sometimes the same motherboard ID is used for different motherboards.

There isn't really any other (sane) way.

However, depending on what you're doing, you might be able to use (for e.g.) the vendor ID and device ID from both the PCI host bridge and the PCI to LPC bridge to help tell the difference between different motherboards in situations where SMBIOS fails. Of course this is still only a hint rather than a reliable unique identifier.


Cheers,

Brendan

[djmauretto]

this is a little SMBIOS utility that i wrote some time ago
DOS, win98/win2k/xp/VIsta/7
Enjoy