Getting the Most Out Of Your Hardware: Motherboard/CPU Utility Roundup

Closing Thoughts

It’s hard to call the modern motherboard utility situation anything other than weird. For the enthusiast and especially the overclocking enthusiast, it’s practically impossible to build and use a system without a good suite of utilities of diagnose a system and adjust it as necessary. That level of customization requires testing, information, and tweaking that can only be done outside of the CMOS, in a full operating system. However instead of the first-parties properly fulfilling those needs, we have the third-parties doing the job, and a much better one at that.

All of the utilities we list, we do so because we consider them essential in one way or another. Each one of these utilities does a specific and important job, and does it well. Frankly, we’re amazed at what some of the authors of these programs have pulled off, often not having the appropriate schematics and engineering resources to do what they’ve done. It’s a testament to the overclocking community that it has done so much with so little.

What it boils down to is that while the first-parties hardware developers can engineer some very fine hardware, their efforts at software fall in between respectable attempts to embarrassing. Call us spoiled, but as we saw with our roundup of video card utilities, there are several great utilities that cover the entire spectrum from simple reporting to very deep tweaking. That same level of abilities however isn’t available with the vast majority of motherboards today, even on expensive enthusiast-level boards.

We won’t deny that it’s a tad unfair to compare video cards and motherboards in such a nature, but we’re also idealists on such matters. The CMOS is cold and clunky, hard to navigate and unhelpful; but right now we still trust it far more than most tweaking applications because it’s logical and reliable. NVIDIA and now AMD are taking a stab at the issue, but it has yet to be enough. Both are quite capable of the task and we hope to one day see the motherboard situation rival that of the video card situation.

In the mean time we won’t call the current situation ideal, but it’s good enough for now. The important thing is that in spite of the lack of quality first-party software, the right tools for the job exist if you know where to look.