What Is HWID?
HWID (Hardware ID) literally means "hardware identifier". It is the sum of ID numbers that game companies, anti-cheat systems and licensing software collect from your hardware to recognize your computer.
HWID is your PC's fingerprint. Just as every person has a unique fingerprint, every computer has a unique HWID combination. Even if you create a new Steam account, logging in from the same PC keeps the HWID the same — EAC, BattlEye, VAC and other systems recognize you as "different account, same machine".
That is exactly why HWID bans work: even if the account changes, the hardware stays the same, so you remain on the ban list.
Which Hardware Pieces Make Up HWID?
A modern anti-cheat (e.g. EAC) typically reads the following:
Disk serial number: a unique number written in the firmware of NVMe and SATA drives. MAC address: physical address of Ethernet and Wi-Fi adapters. SMBIOS: motherboard serial, UUID, baseboard and chassis info. GPU vendor/device ID + GPU serial: graphics card identifier. Monitor EDID serial: the monitor's PnP identifier. System UUID: MachineGuid stored in the Windows registry. CPU info: CPUID, brand string, core topology. TPM 2.0 EK hash: on newer Windows 11 systems, the security module identifier.
Anti-cheat takes a mix of all these IDs and writes them to its ban database. If even one of them is on the ban list, access is blocked.
How Is HWID Changed?
There are two ways to change HWID:
1. Hardware replacement: physically swap the disk, motherboard, GPU, etc. Expensive, slow, and does not cover every identifier. The Windows registry MachineGuid, for instance, stays the same even after a hardware swap — not a clean rotation.
2. HWID spoofer: change IDs temporarily via software. User-mode spoofers run above Windows and are easily detected. Kernel-level spoofers (e.g. HWID Core) load a Ring0 driver and change the IDs in the OS kernel — below the layer anti-cheat can see.
HWID Core rotates disk serial, MAC, SMBIOS, GPU, monitor and system UUID at kernel level. It runs in memory and writes nothing to disk. When the driver unloads, the system returns to its original IDs.
How Do I See My HWID?
To see your own HWID on Windows, open PowerShell as admin and run:
MachineGuid: Get-ItemPropertyValue -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Cryptography' -Name 'MachineGuid'
Disk serial: Get-PhysicalDisk | Select SerialNumber
SMBIOS UUID: Get-CimInstance Win32_ComputerSystemProduct | Select UUID
MAC addresses: Get-NetAdapter | Select Name, MacAddress
The combination of these values is your "hardware fingerprint". Game companies collect some or all of them and write them to the ban database. When HWID Core changes them, the system sees you as a new computer.