How to identify a motherboard?

If anybody can tell me how can I identify a motherboard make and model? :confused: where can i find these information?? :confused: I got the motherboards given to me by a friend and was asking if they would be worth anything?? :D

[blur]Hopefully they arent stolen [/blur] :rolleyes:

What can you see written on them? any manufactuer? partcode or stickers / labels on the chip sets would help.

an easy way would be to actually plug a power supply and graphics card into them and power them up. (for safety i recommend you do this in a pc case rather than loose).
The splash screen at startup or in bios should tell you what you need to know.

Usually motherboards arent worth jack unless there under two years old.

Most motherboards make and model can be found by plugging it into power and switching it on. The initial start screen will show the information that you need. some of them might need you to go into the BIOS to enable the display of the start screen. Bios can be entered by pressing the del key on power up or sometimes the f10. this generally varies with some mobos.

The other thing you could do if you have problems plugging it in would be to look at the mobo where the slots are for putting your cards. eg video card, sound card....

Somewhere in between one of the slots is normally the info on the make and model or sometimes just the model only. If you only have the model then you can search the web for the model and this will normally give you the make cos most mobo manufacturers do not use the same model numbers.

Do a (www.google.com) search for CTBIOS

It's a small utility that identifies your motherboard

motherboards.org has a decent forum and tools to help out.

http://www.motherboards.org/moboidtools.html

http://www.motherboards.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=2

If you want to find out what they are worth, you dont have to find out what motherboard it is, just what it supports.

First look at the cpu socket. Intel or AMD? slot or socket?
Check the ram. If there are 3 sections to the ram slots, its sdram, 2 its DDR.

Are the ram slots evenly spread, or is there one farther out from the others. If there is, its probably dual channel.

Look at the northbridge. If you take off the heatsink (provided there is one), the chipset will probably be listed. Sometimes, the chipset type is even printed on the board.

you can get a pretty good idea of what the motherboard is worth just by checking out these things.

If all else fails, you could always slap the mobo(s) in a case and set up Windows on there and either use Belarc Advisor or Aida32. Those two apps should tell you more than you need to know. Ofcourse that's the most painstaking way of doing it.

Hi,

Haven't done it for a while, but anything sold in the USA should have some kind of federal approval code on it. I understand that this can be used to identify the make and model. As I said, I am not sure if this still works?

Can anyone add anything to this?

Cheers

What .nihil means is the fcc number . It should be in the format FCC xxxxxxxxx . Check the mobo for a silk- screend number like this , and put in the serch function on www.fcc.gov . Viola !!! :D

On this page you can find out how to identify your mobo from the bios (which you should see when you start up the computer top left):
http://users.iafrica.com/g/gl/glynhall/hohweb/bios.htm

They'll tell you what the serial number means that you can find bottom right on startup - it's devided into manufacturer, serial number, model number etc.

But the FCC site is probably the easiest way to do it...