How to get the temperature of motherboard of a PC (and other hardware statistics)?

Question

does any one know how to get the current motherboard, processor or HD temperature statistics?
In GNU/Linux, I know I could use something like hddtemp or sensord to get t

Answer 1

As @AndrewJFord suggest these methods vary from vendor to vendor, indeed from part to part, but I'll make some generalisations if that's ok.

1. As far as I know all current mainstream processors by Intel, AMD and IBM have on-board thermal sensors with known exposed APIs for reading this data. I'm no expert in these APIs so don't know how similar they are but I'd be surprised if Intel's and AMDs API are that much different. If I were you I'd search for an open-source 'system management tool' (there are a few like this written as Apple Widgets by the way) and see how they do it.
2. Motherboards vary a hell of a lot, some have extensive thermal senesoring, some none and all will have fairly different APIs. I'd start by contacting the support people at the company who makes your mobo-of-choice.
3. In general I believe that only very high-end 15krpm SAS disks have built-in thermal sensors, I know that some mid-range systems have sensors taped to their case at the hub and report that back to the mobo. Really not sure on how to get at this info but again I'd start by speaking with the same people as the question above.

Now I'm a big HP user and all of their kit is instrumented by something called Insight Management Agents, of which there are versions available for Windows and most Linux's. What they do is gather all the system information from all their sensors (proc, memory, mobo, fans, disks etc) and expose that via an SNMP-based polling API or via an alert-based SNMP/SMTP/MAPI interface. I dare say IBM/Dell etc will have their own equally good and functionally similar versions but I don't know them sorry. If your machines are 'off-brand'/made-from-kit or you have no control then I'm not aware of any single method of getting at all this information easily.