How to check motherboard chipset?

Question

I am trying to enable Intel VT-x on my Clevo W150ER. The processor is an Intel i7-3610QM and it supports Intel VT-x. However, I've read that my motherboard also has to support it, namely, the chipsets of the motherboard must support it. So I was wondering if anyone here knows a command that can tell me which chipsets my motherboard is using and if they support Intel VT-x as well.

Sources:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16429296/how-to-enable-intel-vt-x?noredirect=1#comment23563737_16429296
• http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2010/04/02/does-my-product-support-intel-vt

Solution

That command you're looking for is dmidecode. dmidecode is a tool for dumping a computer's DMI (some say SMBIOS) table contents in a human-readable format.

To get a full infomation about system hardware:

dmidecode | less

You can use dmidecode with grep to get a specific section from command's results:

sudo dmidecode | grep -A4 'Base Board Information'

You can use dmidecode with --string argument to display a specific piece of information:

sudo dmidecode --string baseboard-manufacturer

For the full list of supported strings checkout the man page.

man dmidecode

If dmidecode is not available on your system, you can install it by running:

sudo apt-get install dmidecode

Comments

[Thomas Ward]

The easiest way to find out the chipset is to look at the detailed system specs from the manufacturer, it should say what the chipset is.

[Punnerud]

I found 'cat /proc/cpuinfo' and 'lscpu' (remove '') to work best without needing apt-get