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Intel inside?

Greg Shultz Tech Republic

Published: 21 Jan 2003 16:12 GMT

How many times have you gone to the System Properties dialog box in the Windows operating system in an attempt to find out the exact speed of the CPU in a particular computer and encountered a generic description like the one shown in Figure A? As you can see, this information is so cryptic that it's useless for most IT support professionals' needs.

Fortunately, there's a little tool from Intel called the Processor Frequency ID Utility that can help. In addition to the exact CPU speed, this utility will provide information on the bus speed, the size of the processor's built-in cache, and much more. Keep in mind that the utility is designed for identifying certain Pentium and Celeron processors -- not all Pentium processors are fully supported. (Another utility is available for identifying AMD processors.)

Figure A

This type of generic information isn't very useful in identifying a system's CPU.

Supported processors
As I mentioned, not all Pentium processors are fully supported by the Processor Frequency ID Utility. The utility is designed to provide information in two categories: CPU Frequency/Speed and CPU Identification Data. This utility will provide information from both categories on some Pentium and Celeron processors, while on older processors it will only provide information in the CPU Identification Data category. Table A lists all Intel processors and identifies which categories are supported.

Table A

Processor	CPU Frequency	CPU ID Data
Pentium 4	Yes	Yes
Mobile Pentium 4	Yes	Yes
Xeon	Yes	Yes
Pentium III	Yes	Yes
Mobile Pentium III with SpeedStep	Yes	Yes
Mobile Pentium III	Yes	Yes
Pentium III Xeon	Yes	Yes
Pentium II	No	Yes
Mobile Pentium II	No	Yes
Pentium II Xeon	No	Yes
Celeron with 0.18 micron core	Yes	Yes
Celeron with 0.13 micron core	Yes	Yes
Celeron with 0.25 micron core	No	Yes
Pentium Pro	No	Yes
Pentium	No	Yes
Mobile Pentium	No	Yes
Pentium with MMX technology	No	Yes
Mobile Pentium with MMX	No	Yes

This table shows the amount of information reported by processor.

Downloading the utility
Downloading the Processor Frequency ID Utility from the Intel site is easy. As I mentioned, there are two versions of the utility: The Windows version, which you can run from within the operating system, and the Bootable version, which you can run from a floppy disk. When you arrive at either of these pages, you'll simply need to click on the appropriate language version. You'll then be directed through several intermediary pages before you can start the download.

Tip
To make installing and using the Bootable version of the Processor Frequency ID utility easier, I suggest that, when you're prompted to select a location to save the file, you create a folder in the root directory called CPUID and download the file to this new folder.

At the time of this writing, the most current version of the Processor Frequency ID Utility is 4.61. The latest revision date is May 2002. The installation file for the Windows version is Fidenu21.exe and the installation file for the Bootable version is Bfid_e16.exe. After you download the utility, proceed to the appropriate installation section of this article.

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