Linux utilities for OC

[HPDZ]

I am looking to make a Core i7-980X system in a few weeks, and I'm getting a little annoyed with the prospect of having to pay yet another couple of hundred bucks for yet another license for Windows. I am considering using Wine on a Linux OS. This system is going to be almost exclusively used for running a custom 64-bit Windows application that is highly numerically intensive, with almost no user interaction for weeks at a time (it's my own code for rendering deep-zoom fractal animations).

 

The question I have is whether there are good OC tools on Linux, comparable to the stuff from CPUID etc for monitoring temperature, fan speeds, etc, and also benchmarking/stability testing programs like OCCT. I suppose that since I plan on trying Wine, the current Windows-based tools ought to work too. Does anyone have any experience with this?

[Waco]

The few times I've used WINE it tends to be more of a headache than anything else - but once you get it up and working (I recommend using a common distro to ease headaches) it's generally pretty decent. You may have trouble reading sensors and stuff on the board but I'd think that the basic stuff like GPU-Z, CPU-Z, and CoreTemp would work.

 

As for your rendering program - it's likely it won't run anywhere near as fast as normal using WINE. Does it do anything fancy (GUI-wise or Windows-specific) or would it be relatively easy to port to Linux?

[The Smith]

Yeah, if it's your own code, I'm sure you can get it to compile and work natively on Linux. It would definitely be the way to go IMO.

 

I know that Prime95 is available for Linux.

[ARandomOWL]

lm-sensors will take care of GPU and CPU temperature reading. IIRC it reads fan speeds and voltages too.

[HPDZ]

Thanks for the info. I will give Wine/Linux a try, and if I am met with anything more than slight inconvenience, I will just get another Win7 license. In the grand scheme of things, it's really not THAT much money, certainly not worth spending more than an hour or two of time trying to avoid. I guess it's just the principle of it that bothers me. Ugh.

 

Anyway.

 

As for porting to Linux...the core of the code is just a bunch of 64-bit arithmetic instructions for arbitrary-precision arithmetic, and a whole lot of other math for doing things like accelerating/slowing zoom speeds and viewpoint etc, so that should be very easy. There's not any GPU usage or real-time animation or anything like that, but the uer interface is a pretty complex Multi-Document Interface with lots of background threads, and it's deeply intertwined with Windows API function calls and uses MFC extensively.

 

I thought Wine was supposed to work pretty well in terms of speed. Especially for something like this, where the vast majority of the CPU utilization is spent doing numerical processing. But that's a topic for a different thread.

 

BTW - I am currently using a Core2 Quad Q6600 2.4 GHz overclocked to 2.9 GHz on a GA-73PVM-S2H (about a 3-year-old system now). I am going to upgrade to a totally new system with a 980x and I'm hoping (expecting!!) to see at least a doubling of the speed of the application -- 1.5X for the 6 cores vs 4 cores, and additional speed increases due to increased clock speed and general processor architectural and motherboard improvements. It will be interesting to see how HyperThreading works on the 980x with this application -- on my old P4ExtremeEdition (Gallatin) I got very mixed results, depending on whether the high-precision arithmetic used SSE instructions or the standard general-purpose instructions. The Core2 of course doesn't have HT. I will post results when I've got the system put together.

[NearlyEpic]

Or you could be like me and get Windows 7 and Visual Studio '10 for free through your school.

[Waco]

If it uses MFC then screw that...porting would suck.

 

You might be okay with Wine if you don't do realtime visualization - I didn't get that from your OP so my mistake.