Graphical Hardware Information Tools

Just a few months ago, I was not even using a graphical environment; videos, music, surfing the internet, instant messaging… all from the terminal. But my philosophy on software has been undergoing subtle changes ever since the I got a faster computer. The thing is, I now default to graphical applications for most tasks. Where aptitude, mplayer, mpd, ncmpc, rtorrent, finch and elinks ruled supreme, synaptic, amarok, smplayer, deluge, pidgin and firefox have the upper hand. So this morning, I decided to find a GUI hardware information program to replace lspci, lshw and dmidecode… not really, I just needed a graphical frontend to these tools.  It took me about 15 minutes to go through the top three: Hardinfo, Sysinfo and Lshw-gtk. Hardinfo was the most impressive of the lot. In addition to hardware information, it can perform benchmark tests and let you compare the results with that of others. My lean, mean and ridiculously affordable box did quite well in the comparison tests. 😀 Sysinfo was a little stingy on information but it’s quite capable. Lshw-gtk, as the name implies, is really just a graphical frontend to lshw and threw up some detailed information about my motherboard and CPU but very little else. I’m keeping only hardinfo for the long term however, the others don’t quite live up to expectations. Anyways, that is only my opinion… I’ll let the screenshots do the rest of the talking:

CPU-Z Benchmark

Blowfish Benchmark

Fibinacci Benchmark

MD5 Benchmark

Ray Tracing Benchmark