Motherboards with TPM chips onboard?

M

mlts

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Apr 22, 2008
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By chance, does anyone know how one can find motherboards that have a TPM 1.2 chip onboard?

So far, searching on most motherboard manufacturer sites comes up with little or nothing. Some ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards have headers for one, but the daughterboard is either not on sale, or its one that may not be compatible with the 1.2 standard.

Intel has a couple mentioned on their site, but when visiting mail order sites, the motherboards mentioned are a 2004-2006 vintage and have long since been discountinued.

Of course, Googling finds motherboards with the "TPM" in the motherboard model name, but little else. There are some announcements by motherboard companies, but they are usually either discontinued. Finding a recent vintage of a motherboard with a TPM 1.2 module is difficult because its rarely listed on the main specs of the motherboard.

Thanks very much in advance for help. I hope I'm not missing something glaringly obvious.
 
I noticed that the few AMD 780G boards had them. It's been a while since I've built anything so I had to Google to see that the thing was. I'm still undecided if "trusted computing" is a good idea. Hasn't Microsoft been telling us they were for years?
 
Out of curiousity, can you tell us what your usage will be and why you need TPM 1.2 specifically?

My understanding is this is more common in OEM motherboards than need TPM than retail ones.
 
Thanks for the response. I'm building a server that will be at a remote site and will be running some server apps for a nonprofit function. The reason that I am looking for a motherboard with TPM 1.2 functionality is twofold:

First, if someone picks the machine up and lugs it off, the information stored on it will be secure. Unless they can directly attack the machine (by knowing a user account and escalating to administrator), having forensic hardware to do a live RAM dump to copy the volume key, or attack it via the network, the data is safe.

Second, the machine will be in an unattended place, so it needs to be able to reboot and get back into operation without anyone at the console if there is a Windows update or a long power outage that the UPS can't handle. If the server had the ability to have people access the console in a timely fashion, a whole disk encryption utility would be optimal.

For these two security needs, Bitlocker + a TPM 1.2 chip is ideal. It allows the machine to boot up while being unattended, but provides security to the stored information.

Thanks for the pointers. So far, I found a couple motherboards on NewEgg that have this feature (finding out they do by cross referencing them with Intel's website)... but they are out of stock.

I also share concerns about "trusted computing", but the main thing I'm using the TPM chip for is a cryptographic smart card that is present on the motherboard, and that can detect tampering of the boot process or case intrusion.
 
TPM terrifies me for a lot of reasons, some of the things it offers is nice (bitlocker), but the things some companies are planning on doing with it just scares the hell out of me. I think that it will become the ultimate weapon of consumer abuse by corporations.
 
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