Many hardware pieces apparently seems to be "brandless". In many other cases, the piece is not manufactured by the brand which is printed at the piece's box, but by some manufacturer in China or Taiwan. Another case very usual is the technician thinking that a sound board is manufactured by Yamaha or Crystal just because the board uses a chip from these brands. Almost always, the manufacturer of the board is a different one from the chip used by the board.

To download a driver or perform a BIOS upgrade, you will need to know the real manufacturer of the hardware piece you want the driver or the BIOS for.

For motherboards you can use softwares like Hwinfo, Everest and Sandra, all of them available at our downloads section, to find out who is the manufacturer and what is model of your motherboard. Read our tutorial How to Find Out Your Motherboard Manufacturer and Model to learn how to use these programs.

For power supplies you can see its Underwriters Laboratories registration number, read our tutorial How to Discover Your Power Supply Real Manufacturer for detailed info on that.

For network cards we've written a full tutorial on this subject.

As for other pieces of hardware, will can find out the manufacturer thru their FCC ID.

Almost all hardware equipment (as weel as any electronic device) have a code called FCC ID. This code is the register of the piece with the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and comes printed somewhere on the piece or device. Through this code you can do a FCC search to find out many information about the piece, including who is its real manufacturer. In order to do that, just fill out one of the forms below.

Be careful, since many pieces and devices bring two FCC codes, onde called FCC REG and another called FCC ID. The search below must be done using the FCC ID code.

The FCC ID code is formed by 17 characters. The first three indicate the manufacturer and the following 14 indicate the product. So, you can find out who is the real manufacturer of a hardware piece by simply entering the first three characters of the FCC ID code in the form below.

For example, supose that a board has the FCC ID code HBQDM336P-DFV1. Entering only the first three characters (HBQ) we will discover the board's manufacturer. Entering the full code, we will discover more details about this equipment. For instance, this example code is from one of the those "brandless" modems (we discovered that this modem is manufactured by UMC).

• Drivers section, with links to almost all hardware manufacturers.