As a developer who is getting into the computer hardware tinkering / desktop building hobbies it is very surprising to find an absence of open source alternatives to the popular computer hardware info / benchmarking / stress testing tools used by the community, for the PC / x86 platform at least. Popular hardware info tools like CPU-Z, GPU-Z, HWMonitors are all closed sourced, and benchmarking tools like Cinebench as well.
The only open source alternative I was able to find was CPU-X, an alternative to CPU-Z:
Another example is I recently got interested in purchasing second hand GPUs and most of the cards found online would have their vbios modded for crypto mining, and to restore to a default bios most people would use the ATIFlash / NVFlash utilities from TechPowerUp. I got interested in how such a utility would work for modern GPUs and to no avail, I could not find any open source tools that would demonstrate the capabilities of these tools
A good reason why some of the benchmarking software is closed source is because it makes it harder for vendors to design ways to circumvent the point of the tests (which is often to test the speed of the hardware).
To me that sounds like just another flavor of security through obscurity, as some vendors will undoubtedly get their hands on the information since the stakes are so high, which defeats the entire line of reasoning. If the source was public, at least the playing field would be level.
The only open source alternative I was able to find was CPU-X, an alternative to CPU-Z:
https://github.com/X0rg/CPU-X
Another example is I recently got interested in purchasing second hand GPUs and most of the cards found online would have their vbios modded for crypto mining, and to restore to a default bios most people would use the ATIFlash / NVFlash utilities from TechPowerUp. I got interested in how such a utility would work for modern GPUs and to no avail, I could not find any open source tools that would demonstrate the capabilities of these tools