Quoting Preston Crawford
I can use gkrellm right now but it's only giving me ambient temperature and for the first few days of running my new P4 with the Zalman fan, I'd like to keep track of the CPU temperature. It appears that in order to do that I'll have to update Sensors from YOU and modprobe a few modules. Does that play any havoc with the operation of the system or is that fine?
The only caveat I am aware of is on IBM Thinkpad laptops, running sensors trashes the system (NVRAM or BIOS IIRC, but it is very late). I run gkrellm all the time on my desktop machine and on my Thinkpad laptop (using ACPI temperature). Gkrellm uses 6% CPU at idle (600MHz clock of 1600MHz max, C2 state, no throttling). The load is worthwhile for me, YMMV. Jeffrey