I both love and loathe Conky in equal amounts. For all it’s inanely needless complexity it can produce some beautiful things.
Just take this minimally-stunning ‘Conky orange’ theme by GNOME-look user hardball.
Amongst the many circular displays you can see are a clock, CPU monitor (with top 3 processes listed), RAM usage (with top 3 largest memory users) and information on your hard-disks and network connection.
Download @ gnome-look.org/content/show.php/conky_orange