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Question

I just received my brand spanking new W520 Thinkpad and I'm concerned because if you run CPU-Z or you open a cmd window and type in "wmic idecontroller get deviceid" you would expect to see if your W520 board is B2 stepping or B3 stepping.   If  REV_04 is displayed through either of these methods would this  indicate a B2 (buggy hardware) stepping whereas a revision 5 is a newer stepping without the bugs?

Chipset Series 6 Announcement

Can Lenovo explain these unexpected reporting results?

Answer

While some B2 level preproduction ThinkPads may exist as part of pre-release testing and may have be provided to select large accounts for early evaluation and development of standardized images, no production level ThinkPads have been built and shipped with B2 level chips.   The erroneous results returned by some software tools is related to Lenovo's implementation of CRID.  Lenovo's engineering team explains:

"Lenovo has not shipped B2 Sandy Bridge silicon on production ThinkPad systems. The ID being referenced returns the Intel CRID -- Compatibility Revision ID -- of the chip, not the actual chipset revision. This is a feature implemented by Intel and Lenovo on recent ThinkPad notebooks which, in order to maintain image stability required by many Large Enterprise customers, hides a chip revision change from the Operating System, such as Microsoft Windows to keep it from re-installing device drivers when it detects a revision ID change. This is a web page which describes Intel Stable Image Platform Program --http://www.intel.com/itcenter/topics/refresh/sipp.htm "

You can use the ME Info program Intel provides for use with their Management Engine. 

Preparation: 

(1) Go to Support page , which is a link for Intel AMT Management Engine Firmware

(2) Download 83rf30ww.exe (middle of the page)

(3) Run 83rf30ww.exe

NOTE - this will NOT install anything, and will only extract files onto your system (default location is C:\DRIVERS\WIN\ME)

After the ME Firmware Update Utility has been extracted, (assuming that you accept the default destination of

C:\DRIVERS\WIN\ME ) you can determine the PCH version as follows:

(4) Open a Command Prompt window as an Administrator

(5) Type CD DRIVERS\WIN\ME to switch to the folder selected in step 3 above

(6) Type MEInfoWin.exe  and press enter to display the ME information

(7) Scroll up or down as necessary to display the PCH Version: information line

If the PCH Version is:

                                  - 600004, then your system is a B2 Stepping system.

                                  - 4 , then your system is a B3 Stepping system.

(8) To avoid accidental updating of your system in the future, we strongly recommend erasing the C:\DRIVERS\WIN\ME directory after you are done.

Here is an example of of the returned results:

PCH ID got revised after version 7.1.13.1088 onwards.

Version 7.1.14.1107

• [Important] Enhanced several security functions.

Version 7.1.13.1088

• (Fix) Fixed an issue where the system might hung during transition to suspend when ME was enabled.
• (Fix) Fixed an issue where MEInfoWin tool returned incorrect PCH Revision ID.