Intel Processor ID Utility

[riso]

The recent news that a US retailer was found to be inadvertently selling fake Intel CPUs suggests that it's a very good idea to check any hardware you buy, just to be sure you're getting what you've paid for. And in the case of Intel CPU's, there's no better place to turn than the company's own Processor ID Utility. Run this and it quickly reports everything you could ever want to know about your processor: speed, number of cores, L2 cache size, the technologies it supports, the packaging, and more.

There's also a bootable version that you can use to check the CPU in a system that won't otherwise start (or isn't running Windows), but beware - this can be difficult to get working.

http://support.intel.com/support/processors/tools/piu/