We see queries like this on a regular basis. There is, in fact, nothing wrong and this has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with your system's performance. Let me explain...
First of all, the "chipset" is actually only a single chip, called the Platform Controller Hub (PCH). Within this chip are a large number of "devices" that implement support for USB Buses, USB Hubs, SATA lanes, GPIO/FlexIO lanes, PCIe lanes, peripheral buses (LPC, HDA, SPI, SMBus, I2C, etc.), Power Management, Interrupt Controllers, DMA Controllers, Timers, Clocks, UARTs, LAN MAC, etc. (Whew!). Each of these devices is identified by a particular Device ID. This Device ID is used to locate and access the device's registers, etc., thereby allowing this device to be configured and then manipulated as necessary.
Ok, that was a pretty heady introduction; hopefully I didn't lose you, 'cause now it gets even more complicated...
From one chipset generation to another, improvements will be made in the PCH chip. New devices might be added. Unnecessary devices might be removed. Other devices might be replaced with improved versions. Now, both new and improved devices will have a new and unique Device ID assigned to them. Most important to our discussion, devices that do not change will keep their existing Device IDs. What this means is that the identification of the chipset via its Device ID might get the chipset generation wrong because the same Device ID is present in multiple chipset generations. Most commonly, an older chipset is misidentified as being preset. In your case, it is misidentifying the chipset for the devices managing the LPC, PMC and SMBus Buses and a number of the PCIe Root ports. More importantly, because these particular devices have not changed, any configuration data for them will not have changed either and this their performance will be consistent. That is, this chipset misidentification cannot affect performance.
Did you follow that? If not, please let me know what is losing you and I will attempt to explain it better.
Intel does not discretely provide Device Drivers for many of the devices in the PCH. Instead, Intel provides these Device Drivers to Microsoft and Microsoft builds them into the Windows O/S. Now, Windows needs to know how to associate particular Device IDs with particular Device Drivers, so the correct ones are loaded and the correct configuration data is used to initialize these Device Drivers. Intel provides a set of INF (Information) files that provide both the device associations information and any data that is necessary for optimal configuration of the device. Microsoft builds the most-recent set of INF files made available into their Windows releases. If a newer chipset is released, Microsoft will have a newer version of the INF files on the Windows Update servers and will use these when this newer chipset is recognized. Intel also makes the newer sets of INF files available on their download site in an integrated installation package. These packages used to be called the INF Update package, but Intel has lately been calling these Chipset Device Software package.
Ok, the next question will be: how do I fix the misidentification of the chipset that has occurred? Just installing the latest version of the Chipset Device Software package will not fix the misidentification. The problem is that, if a device's Device ID has not changed and the INF file for it has not materially changed, the package installer will not install it as it is unnecessary. Thus, you are stuck with the older version that might have a different string describing the chipset. What you need to do is tell the package installer to always install the INF files. To do this, follow these steps:
- Download the latest Chipset Device Software package. As Leonardo indicated, your board manufacturer should have this package on their download site.
- The package comes as a ZIP file. Extract the contents of this ZIP file to a temporary folder.
- Open a Command Prompt window.
- Make this temporary folder the current folder.
- Execute command "SetupChipset.exe -overall".
- Reboot.
That's it. After the reboot, your chipset will be properly identified.
Let me know if I need to explain anything further...
...S
