When we think of PCI or PCI Express devices, the first of the few things that come to mind are those expensive graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD which you have to plug into the PCI card slots on your computer’s motherboard. But PCI devices do not always come as external installable cards. In fact, most of the PCI devices in your computer come built into your motherboard. For example, most of the motherboards today come with ethernet network port and audio output built into the motherboard, both of these existing in form of PCI devices. If you want to explore all the PCI devices that exist on your motherboard then you can use the free PCI-Z application for Windows. It can detect all the PCI, PCI-Express and PCI-Extended devices.
You can get the PCI-Z freeware from the PCI-Z software website. The download is available in many different formats – portable 32-bit version, portable 64-bit version and their 7-Zip archives. The 32-bit version works for all the users, but if you have a 64-bit Windows, then it is better to use the 64-bit version.
The PCI-Z application after being launched shows a list of all the PCI devices connected to your computer’s motherboard whether on-board or through PCI slots. On my test PC, it detected sixteen PCI devices, about some of them I had no idea about. If you find a device that you want to find a driver of, then you can right-click on that device and copy its PCI ID or device name and google it to locate its driver or more information about it.
The PCI-Z application also allows you to export the list of all the detected devices in form of a CSV database file. You can send this CSV file to your system administrator so that he/she can help you with identifying device driver for the detected devices.
Conclusion: The PCI-Z is a small application for Windows that helps you find out all the PCI, PCI-X and PCI-E devices connected to your computer’s motherboard. You can export the list of all the devices or search for the devices on the internet to find their latest drivers.
You can download PCI-Z from http://www.pci-z.com/.