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MBM5 or Via Monitoring? Upsides/Downsides? Not a poll.

MichaelD

MichaelD

Lifer
Good morning everyone. Took a look at MBM5. It's "big and complicated" when compared to the Via monitoring utility that came with my mobo. Is there any benefit to using MBM vs. Via? Does MBM use up much more resources than Via? I was thinking about giving MBM a test-run, but thought it wise to solicit opinions first. Fire away and thanks.
 
MBM5 is *great* and uses a helluva lot LESS system resources than MBM4. i.e. a typical 6 hour Win2K session with MBM5 updating the tray every 10 seconds has the MBM5.EXE process only having used 15 seconds of CPU time by the time I shutdown.

With MBM4, that figure might be around 45 seconds. So a threefold reduction in system resource usage in MBM5. I'd like to see those idiots at VIA come up with something better.

With regards to benchmarking, the impact is minimal, on the order of 1-3%, much less than any anti-virus program. Of course you should still disable it for accurate benchmark results, but I'm saying the impact on your work is minimal.

Combine MBM5 with ShutDownNow (SHDN) and the benefits far outweigh the undetectable performance hit. If I had one of those hot TBird's putting out 70watts of thermal energy, MBM would be a lifesaver if my heatsink fan ever died. With my cool P3 it's not much of an issue, but still...
 
LocutusX,

Thanks for the detailed reply. I may give it a shot tonight. The Via utility does have an alarm function that alerts you if any of the parameters are exceeded. But, the Via utility doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of parameters as MBM does. Being that MBM has all this "stuff", my main concern was how much resources it uses. But you answered that one! Thanks Bud.
 
Does MBM5 have a temperature graph setting like MBM4 did? I couldn't find it and that's the only thing that's keeping me from switching. 🙁
 
It can save the log as a CSV file which you can probably open in Excel and make into a graph. But I just save the log as txt, don't really care about graphs.
 
The real-time graphing comes in handy for before/after cooling testing. Especially if you have your fans on switches. I'm not quite sure that MBM4 is getting along with WinME very well. Every few days I'll start getting "out of memory" errors and I have 512MB memory and an unlimited-size swap file 😕
Everything seems to be fine after I shut MBM4 down though.
 
MBM4 wasn't written very efficiently... suggest you try MBM5. Although it may LOOK bloated, it most certainly isn't, the author revised 90% of the code or so, everything is much more streamlined.

I used to think that since MBM 4.18 did everything I needed to and didn't have any bugs, that it was fine... but I'm glad I upgraded to MBM 5.07b and am appreciating the fact that it takes less CPU time, occupies less memory, etc.
 
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