After a painful experience where my graphics card gave off a burning smell and I found out it had died, I realized the hardware temperature program I was using wasn't enough. It could only detect CPU temperature. So I went looking for something else and found OpenHardwareMonitor. It can read the temperatures of many components in your computer, such as the hard drive, graphics card, CPU, and motherboard, and it can also plot temperature changes as a chart or export them to a file.

Introduction to OpenHardwareMonitor:

OpenHardwareMonitor Features:

  • Plots temperature changes as a chart
  • Monitors the temperature of multiple hardware components (hard drive, graphics card, CPU, motherboard)
  • Still being updated, with support for many newer hardware devices (including CPUs from both AMD and Intel)

OpenHardwareMonitor Tutorial:

1.Open the OpenHardwareMonitor main program. It starts a bit slowly, so give it a moment.

2.The main window shows the temperatures of the hardware in your computer, along with other hardware information such as CPU clock speed and motherboard model.

3.Checking hardware temperatures is fairly easy. But what if you want to plot the temperature changes as a chart? Click 【View】→【Show Plot】 on the toolbar at the top.

4.After you turn on Show Plot, you’ll notice a new box at the bottom of the program. You’ll also see small checkboxes in front of each temperature value. Checking one causes that temperature to be drawn in the large box at the bottom.

For example, if I want to show the temperatures of the 4 CPUs (I have a quad-core), I check the box in front of CPU, and the temperature changes then appear below.

5.You can also set it to start automatically when Windows starts. To do this, click 【Options】→【 Run On Windows Startup 】 on the toolbar at the top.