It occurred to me that a lot of the issues raised here seem to often relate to voltages, both of the PSU and particularly around memory. Is it possible to get the voltages off the mobo and record them. I'm thinking of the basic PSU voltages - down to a fine granularity, and also the voltages for the memory, and logging them over a period and then being able to look at them and see if they coincide with any BSOD's, hangs/freezes or slow-downs? Do these voltages appear anywhere that could be accessed and programmatically recorded? I'm thinking of a simple VB type prog that could be written to do this? Cheers
Your best bet is a multimeter and a board with readout points, such as the Asus ROG series. It also has the benefit of being able to read the voltages even when the system has crashed.
Something like Cpuid HW Monitor is quite accurate, you could take screen shots at various loads. I use it a lot just for checking everything as it should be when I'm overclocking. It might not be quite what you're looking for but I find it really useful.
the Cpuid HW monitor readings depend on how good the sensors built into the motherboard are in the first place. I've set my cpu voltage to one number in the bios, only to see 2 completely different numbers in cpuid and the monitoring program that came with my motherboard.
Thats a good point actually, it's normally pretty good, but like you say depends on the sensors. I was giving Project Heat Blast a final shake down the other night, before it got wrapped up and the CPU temp was reading between 8-11 degrees, when I know for a fact that it should be low-mid 20's. On my other 2 rigs I've found it just about spot on.
HWMonitor can't give you the voltage readings from the PSU rails though, which I think is what the OP wants.
Correct, it's really voltages (and even better, CPU load, I/O load as well) I'm thinking about. Ironically, I own a s/w company where our products monitor very large servers and gather all sorts of performance and platform data - that data is collected initially on the servers themselves, and we then snap-shot that data every x-seconds and build a history for analysis with our wizzy data visualisation stuff. Sadly, it seems there's no comparable way on a vanilla mobo to get the voltage etc data out "programmatically" so I could build a history and subsequently review/analyse it? I was hoping for some sort of API (I know I know, ridiculously optimistic) that could be polled on an automated basis, or something similar? Cheers.
I/O and CPU and many more loads can be monitored using windows performance logger, it's in administrative tools in the control panel. Some motherboards have points where you can attach a multimeter to so you can get cpu, motherboard and memory voltage readings but if you want accuracy you'll need an expensive multimeter. Some MSI motherboards have a feature called Green Power Genie where you can plug a supplied device into the PSU and measure the 12v, 3.3v and 5v rails.
Aida64 can do pretty much everything you'd ever need a monitor program to do. but it's not free. i've set it to record voltage, temperature to a csv file, so it can easily be opened by Excel and plotted. but it's only as accurate as your motherboard's sensor. im guessing this is what you want, some simple way to monitor voltage. not professionally using external data-logging hardware.
Oh and Intel Parralax can monitor how much of what kind of data goes where apparently, if you can get your head round it.
