Finding your board's exact model on Windows 11, now that the command everyone still recommends has been removed
Press Windows + R, type msinfo32, and read the BaseBoard rows. If you would rather have it in a terminal, open PowerShell and run Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_BaseBoard. Do not bother with wmic baseboard get product,manufacturer, the command almost every article still leads with: Microsoft removed the WMIC utility from Windows 11 in August 2026, and it cannot be added back.
Knowing your exact board is step zero for nearly everything else. You cannot download the right firmware without it, you cannot tell which processors the socket takes, and you cannot look up whether a memory kit is on the support list. This page covers the ways to get it that still work, and is explicit about the one that does not.
Windows ships a tool for this. Press Windows + R, type msinfo32 and press Enter.
msinfo32
Microsoft's reference for the command describes it as opening "the System Information tool to display a comprehensive view of the hardware, system components, and software environment on the local computer." It opens on the System Summary category, and the board appears there on three consecutive rows: BaseBoard Manufacturer, BaseBoard Product and BaseBoard Version.
Those three rows are the same three values the rest of this page is about. System Information is a window onto them; PowerShell is a command onto them. Neither one knows anything the other does not.
Open PowerShell — right-click Start, then Terminal or Windows PowerShell — and run:
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_BaseBoard | Select-Object Manufacturer, Product, Version, SerialNumber
No administrator rights are needed for this one, and nothing is installed. Get-CimInstance is a built-in cmdlet that, in Microsoft's words, "gets the CIM instances of a class from a CIM server"; the -ClassName parameter "specifies the name of the CIM class for which to retrieve the CIM instances." Win32_BaseBoard is the class that "represents a baseboard, which is also known as a motherboard or system board." PowerShell also ships gcim as an alias for the cmdlet, if you are typing it often.
Four properties are worth asking for, and Microsoft's class reference defines each of them:
| Property | Microsoft's definition | What you use it for |
| Manufacturer | "Name of the organization responsible for producing the physical element." | Which vendor's support site to open. |
| Product | "Baseboard part number defined by the manufacturer." | The model. This is the one you search for. |
| Version | "Version of the physical element." | The board revision, where the vendor sets one. |
| SerialNumber | "Manufacturer-allocated number used to identify the physical element." | Warranty and RMA conversations. Do not post it publicly. |
Note what Product is documented as: a part number, not a marketing name. That distinction is the subject of two sections below, and it is the reason a model string sometimes looks nothing like the name on the box.
If you have searched this question before, you have met this command:
wmic baseboard get product,manufacturer — removed, not deprecated
It was the standard answer for twenty years, and on a current Windows 11 machine it now returns nothing but an error. Two things happened, several years apart.
First the deprecation. Microsoft's WMIC reference states that "WMIC is deprecated as of Windows 10, version 21H1; and as of the 21H1 semi-annual channel release of Windows Server," and that "this utility is superseded by Windows PowerShell for WMI." Deprecated software still runs, so almost nobody changed anything.
Then the removal. The same page now carries a second notice: "Starting in August 2026, Windows 11, versions 24H2 and 25H2 no longer include the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) utility and it can't be added back as a Feature on Demand (FoD). WMIC is already removed by default in new installations of these versions." Microsoft's support topic on the removal puts it more bluntly still — "The WMIC utility has been removed from Windows 11" and "It is no longer available as a Feature on Demand (FoD)" — and adds that WMIC is also removed from Windows 11, version 26H1.
These are two different things with confusingly similar names, and the distinction is the whole reason the PowerShell command above still works. WMIC was a command-line front end. WMI is the data layer underneath it, and Microsoft is explicit that it stays: "This change affects only the WMIC utility. Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) remains supported." Every value WMIC used to print is still there. Only the program that printed it is missing. If you have batch files that call it, Microsoft's guidance is to "plan to rewrite them using PowerShell cmdlets."
The value in Product is written into the board's firmware by whoever built it, and Microsoft documents it as mapping to the SMBIOS Type 2 Product field. That has a practical consequence: it is whatever the vendor decided to put there, which is usually the engineering name for the board and not the full name printed on the retail box.
Read it in pieces. A string like ROG STRIX B650E-E GAMING WIFI carries the product line, the chipset, a tier suffix and, here, the wireless edition. The chipset is the part that tells you the most: it fixes the socket, and with it the processor family the board was built for. Our chipsets guide covers what each one guarantees.
What the string frequently does not settle is the variant, and on this site that is the difference between the right download and the wrong one:
So take Version along with Product, and if the two together still do not pin down which edition you own, settle it against the board itself rather than guessing. Colour is not a variant. Wireless, memory generation and revision are.
Sometimes the answer is useless: a blank field, a bare code, or something like "To be filled by O.E.M." Windows is not failing. It is reporting exactly what it was given.
The chain is short. The board's firmware publishes an SMBIOS table, Windows reads the baseboard entry out of it, and Win32_BaseBoard.Product is that entry. Microsoft documents the mapping directly. Nothing in that chain looks the board up anywhere or corrects it — so if the vendor wrote a placeholder into firmware, a placeholder is what you get, on every tool that reads it. Changing tools will not change the answer.
This is most common on prebuilt and OEM machines, where the board was made to order for one system model and never sold separately. In that situation the useful identifier is usually the system model rather than the board model, because that is what the manufacturer's support site is organised around, and it is what their firmware downloads are indexed by. System Information reports it a few rows above the BaseBoard block, and the machine's own service tag or serial number will get you to the same place.
One more wrinkle worth knowing: Win32_BaseBoard can return more than one instance on systems that have several baseboards. The class carries a HostingBoard property for exactly this, documented as true when "the card is a motherboard, or a baseboard in a chassis." On an ordinary desktop you will see one row and can ignore this entirely.
If the machine will not boot into Windows, or you would rather not trust what Windows reports, the firmware knows what it is running on. Restart, and press the setup key during boot — Delete on most desktop boards, F2 on many others; the board prints it on the splash screen.
Every vendor puts the board model and the current firmware version on the first screen of its BIOS setup utility, usually in a header strip or an EZ-mode summary panel. This is the most authoritative answer available to you without opening the case, because it is the board describing itself rather than an operating system relaying a table.
It is also the answer you want before flashing anything. Our BIOS update guide covers what to do with it, including the part where you find and save your BitLocker recovery key before you start.
With the case open and the machine off, the model is silk-screened onto the board in white text. There is no single standard location, but the usual placements are between the memory slots and the top PCIe slot, alongside the DIMM slots, or near the board's edge.
Take the revision with it if one is printed alongside. That is the field that decides which firmware file is the correct one, and it is not always exposed to software.
If you go this route, do it properly: shut down, switch off at the wall, and give the power supply a moment to discharge before you put a hand inside the case.
There is a category of free hardware-inspection utilities — CPU-Z, HWiNFO and Speccy are the ones you will see named — that read the same SMBIOS tables and present them in one window alongside the processor, memory and chipset. What they add is convenience and adjacent detail, not better information about the board.
Two things follow from that. First, if System Information returned a placeholder, one of these will return the same placeholder, because the source is identical. Second, nothing on this page requires one: everything above ships with Windows.
We are not linking downloads for any of them and we are not telling you which to pick. Utilities of this kind are widely repackaged with bundled software by sites that did not write them, and the only safe download is the developer's own — which is a judgement about a URL, not about a motherboard, and therefore not ours to make for you.
You will need this the moment you look at a CPU support list or a security advisory. System Information shows it as BIOS Version/Date, a few rows above the BaseBoard block. In PowerShell it is one class along:
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_BIOS | Select-Object Manufacturer, SMBIOSBIOSVersion, ReleaseDate
Win32_BIOS "represents the attributes of the computer system's basic input/output services (BIOS) that are installed on a computer." SMBIOSBIOSVersion is documented as the "BIOS version as reported by SMBIOS", and ReleaseDate as the "release date of the Windows BIOS in the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) format of YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.MMMMMM(+-)OOO" — which is why the date comes back as a long run of digits rather than something readable.
Prefer SMBIOSBIOSVersion to the generic Version property, and Microsoft's own remarks say why: "The properties in the Win32_BIOS class may change for a specific computer system with the same BIOS, for example booting through a legacy BIOS mode vs. booting through UEFI BIOS mode. However the properties retrieved from the SMBIOS structures should remain the same." The SMBIOS-sourced field is the stable one.
With the manufacturer, the model and the firmware version in hand, three things open up.
Every command, class, property and quotation on this page comes from Microsoft's own documentation, linked in full below and read in full. Nothing here is a test result: no command on this page was run on a machine to produce a screenshot or an output listing, and we describe what the documentation says each one returns rather than what any particular computer showed. Two details are ours rather than Microsoft's, and we would rather say so: the row labels inside System Information's System Summary view are not named in Microsoft's msinfo32 reference, which documents the tool and its categories but not individual rows; and the silk-screen placements in the section above are the common ones across boards generally, not a claim about any specific model.
Published 27 August 2026. Microsoft sources last read on 27 August 2026.
Now that you have the model and the version: when a flash is worth doing, and how to do it without losing the machine.
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