System inventory

The system inventory is the right-hand panel of the Inspect System overview. It is a single scrolling report of what this machine is, assembled from live reads at the moment you open it.

Use it when you need to answer a hardware or configuration question without opening five different system tools. It tells you which memory modules are populated and at what speed, and whether Secure Boot is on. It also shows how much life the SSD reports, and whether a filtering driver sits in the network path.

A table of contents down the side jumps to each section. Novabench omits sections your hardware does not have.

System

Identity of the machine as its firmware reports it.

Manufacturer and Model are the fields that drive warranty lookup and fleet model grouping. A machine that reports a blank or generic manufacturer does not match a baseline or a warranty provider.

Operating System

Uptime and Fast startup are worth reading together. Windows fast startup makes a shutdown behave like hibernation. A machine can therefore report weeks of uptime despite being "shut down" nightly. Driver or update problems can persist across what the user believes was a restart.

CPU

Speculative execution mitigations

Below the core fields, Novabench lists the state of each known speculative execution mitigation, along with a one-line summary of the set.

Mitigations cost performance, and some organizations turn them off on purpose for compute-heavy workloads. Reduced is a factual statement about configuration, not a warning. It is also a common explanation for one machine that benchmarks faster than an identical machine beside it.

Microcode revision matters for the same reason. A pending microcode update can change both the mitigation set and CPU performance. That appears in test trends as a step change with no hardware event behind it.

Memory

The card opens with totals and configuration, then lists each physical slot.

Each slot shows Format, Configured and Max speed, and data and total widths. An unpopulated slot reads Empty. That is the fastest way to confirm whether a machine has room to expand, and whether it runs in dual-channel mode.

Memory profiles

When Novabench can read the module's stored profiles, it flags two conditions:

• Faster profile available: the modules support a higher rated speed than the system currently runs. This usually means XMP or EXPO is not enabled in firmware. It is one of the most common causes of a memory score that falls below a baseline.
• Custom overclock: the running configuration does not match any stored profile, so someone tuned it by hand.

For background on what those profiles are, see XMP and EXPO explained.

Graphics

One card per adapter.

Negotiated PCIe link width is the field to check when a discrete GPU benchmarks well below expectation. A card that sits at x4 in an x16 slot, or at a lower generation than the card and board both support, is a seating or firmware problem rather than a defective card.

Storage

One card per physical drive, with volumes listed underneath.

SMART health

Where the drive exposes it, Novabench reads SMART health data directly.

Life Remaining is the number to watch on a fleet of aging laptops. Host Writes against NAND Writes gives you the write amplification factor, which is a better predictor of endurance problems than age.

Firmware

Boot mode and TPM together determine Windows 11 eligibility, so this section answers the upgrade question directly. When Secure Boot reports Setup mode, the platform key is cleared. Secure Boot is available, but it enforces nothing.

Network

Network filters

Novabench enumerates software sitting in the network path and groups it by category:

Novabench collapses built-in filters behind a count because they are present everywhere and are rarely the answer. What matters is the rest. A stack of EDR, VPN, and content-filter drivers in the same path often explains latency that no speed test result seems to justify.

Novabench also tracks filter changes over time. On Novabench for Work, Novabench records an added or removed filter as a change. You can correlate it against network test results. See change detection.

Battery

Health carries a confidence label of High, Medium, Low, or Unknown, depending on how much of the underlying data the battery controller actually reported. A Low confidence figure is a rough estimate. It must not be the sole basis for a replacement decision. Battery health charts the same values over time, which is a far better signal than any single reading.

Virtualization

Reports whether the machine is a virtual machine, and whether it is a VDI session. It also names the detected platform: Apple Virtualization, AWS Nitro, GCP KVM, Azure Hyper-V, and others.

This section changes how you read every benchmark on the machine. Scores from a virtual desktop reflect the host, the hypervisor, and the current neighbor load. See VDI validation for testing virtual desktops deliberately.

OS Updates (Plus)

A machine with failed updates and a stale last-successful date is usually a broken update client rather than a policy decision. It is worth catching before it becomes a compliance finding.

Security (Pro)

Security posture reads the state of the platform's built-in protections. The fields differ by operating system.

Windows

• Antivirus and anti-spyware state, with signature currency and signature age
• The registered firewall product, and per-profile firewall state for Domain, Private, and Public
• UAC, and SmartScreen for apps and files and for Edge
• Defender realtime and tamper protection
• Last quick and full scan times, and active threat count
• Attack surface reduction, and controlled folder access

macOS

Gatekeeper, System Integrity Protection, XProtect version, the application firewall, and firewall stealth mode.

Every field distinguishes an unreadable value from a negative one. A row that reads Unknown means Novabench could not determine the state. That is not the same as Disabled. Reporting the two identically turns a collection gap into a false compliance failure.

Warranty (Pro)

Warranty and coverage has prerequisites that the other sections do not because the data comes from OEM management software rather than from the hardware. It has its own page: warranty and coverage.