TR Forums

I've noticed that it can be difficult to distinguish the difference between a machine that has Dual-core processors with Hyperthreading enabled and a machine that has full Quad-core processors. Can anyone recommend a diagnostic program that will run on Windows and/or Linux and tell me quickly:

Processor family, number of cores, amount of RAM, Motherboard chipset, other valuable folding factors?

Extra points if the program can run off a USB stick or CD without requiring installation on the machine under analysis; more extra points if it updates frequently to keep-up with the latest processors in development from Intel, AMD, and others

CPU-Z should do it.

Extra points heading my way.....

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download425.html

Golly! That appears to be just the thing.... Is there a Linux equivalent somewhere?

-dP

I'm pretty sure you can do it by parsing out /proc/cpuinfo which will be present in almost any Linux distro - including CD and USB bootable ones. I think important fields are "physical id", "siblings", "core id", "cpu cores" and the "ht" flag (shows that the processor is Hyper-Thread capable - regardless of enabled or not). You may also be able to pick some stuff out of "dmidecode".

A quick google turned up hwinfo, Perlmon, and dmidecode. Hope this helps.

Some of my newer boxes have powerful AMD and nVidia video cards, but the "real work" applications they run aren't graphically involved, so I've got the drivers configured as VESA VGA. Is there a program that will probe AGP and PCIe to tell me what I've got running there?

lspci.