How to get PC motherboard temperature (and other hardware statistics)?

Question

Does anyone know how to get current statistics on motherboard, processor or HD temperature?
On GNU / Linux, I know that I can use something like hddtemp or sensord to get information and then analyze it ... but on Windows: how can I do this? And, can this be done using C # or Java or any other height level programming language?
Thanks!

Answer 1

The problem with temperature and other monitoring sensors is that there is no common protocol at the hardware level, as well as no drivers that can extract this information using the usual API.

The software, as already mentioned, SpeedFan and HWMonitor (from the developers of the CPU-Z utility) works by painstakingly cataloging various sensors and bus controllers and implementing the appropriate protocols, usually using a kernel-mode driver to access SMBus devices.

To embed this functionality in your own software, you can develop this functionality yourself (perhaps reduce the amount of work by adapting it to specific hardware and using the Linux code from www.lm-sensors.org as reference information) or by buying a commercial library, which implements it. One used by HWMonitor is available here .

luck

Answer 2

I would say that when the correct configurations are in place, it can outperform windows alone.

http://www.lm-sensors.org/ is what all the work does. I had this connected to RRDgraph and Munin, and I controlled the temperature of my room for almost a year and had nice nice graphics. Also showed that my processor fan was slowly dropping, and I saw the line tilted for a long time and knew that it was on the way.

http://www.lm-sensors.org/browser/lm-sensors/trunk/doc/developers/applications is what you want.

(oh wait, I am failing. your on * nix wants to do this on windows. my bad: (...... good, good luck. maybe I will leave it here if someone finds your message during the search vice versa )

Back when I used windows, all I remember is Ye 'Old Motherboard Monitor (discontinued) . The Wiki article says there is speedfan , and this seems like your best option. Programmatically, I think you will need to find the hardware specifications and dig through the windows API and stack downloads of arbitrary bus address offsets.

Answer 3

As AndrewJFord suggests, these methods vary from provider to provider, in part to part, but I will make some generalizations if this is normal.

• As far as I know, all modern Intel, AMD and IBM processors have built-in temperature sensors with well-known APIs for reading this data. I am not an expert in these APIs, so I don’t know how similar they are, but I would be surprised if the Intel and AMD APIs are different. If I were you, I would look for an open source system management tool (by the way, some of them are written as Apple Widgets) and see how they do it.
• Motherboards are very different from many, some of them have extensive thermal sensitization, some of them and all will have quite different APIs. I will start by contacting support people at the company that will make your mobile decision.
• In general, I believe that only very powerful 15krpm SAS drives have built-in temperature sensors, I know that some mid-range systems have sensors attached to their case in the hub and report this back to the mobile. Not really sure how to get this information, but I started talking to the same people again as the question above.

Now I am a big HP user, and their entire kit is equipped with something called "Insight Management Agents", of which versions for Windows and most Linux are available. They collect all system information from all of their sensors (proc, memory, mobo, fans, disks, etc.) and expose it through the SNMP polling API or through the SNMP / SMTP / MAPI interface based on the notification. I dare say that IBM / Dell, etc. They will have their equally good and functionally similar versions, but I do not know, sorry. If your cars are “out of brand” / made from the kit or you do not have control, I don’t know of any way to easily get all this information.

I hope this helps.

Phil.

Answer 4

This will vary greatly depending on your equipment. Once you find out from your hardware vendor if you have sensors on the motherboard, you can study the use of SNMP and MIB HOST-RESOURCE.

Use the Add / Remove Windows Components Wizard in the Management and Monitoring Tools section to install SNMP. You can then request a lot of information from your Windows window using standard system management software such as OpenView or Nagios.