Monitor CPU temperature using Core Temp

Posted on November 13, 2008 at 5:54 am

Current semiconductor CPUs like Intel’s Core 2 and AMD’s Athlon along with their more advanced offspring have a technology called DTS (Digital Temperature Signal) that can provide the temperature of each core of the CPU. If you are interested, a more detailed “how it works” article is located here. This is useful if you suspect that your computer is overheating. You might need to fix your fan or internal cooling system if the readings are not

In my home computer, my AMD Athlon X2 has the following results using Core Temp:

Get Core Temp from this link or this link. It is a small but powerful program written by Arthur Liberman. You should be able to run it on both XP and Vista. The two most important things to notice on the Temp core window is the ID of the CPU and the temperature of each core:

We can see from above that there is about 10 degree Celsius differential between the two cores. This is an interesting fact since I always assumed that the two cores have almost the same temperature.

Another distinctive feature of the program is that you will be able to see the readings of each core on the Quick Lunch toolbar. This will appear as long as the program is running.

It is worth commending the developer who worked on this software for making it run on minimal footprint. In my setup, it only used 3MB of RAM with almost zero CPU utilization:

Besides core temp readings, there are information like TCaseMax and TDP that can help you determine “overclockability” and heat build-up on AMD processors:

If you are interested in overclocking using the concepts above, you can read this post from hardforum.com:http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1043186

So when do we say that we need to add additional cooling? First we need to determine how much our processor can handle. This resource is a good guide: http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm

From above you can see the maximum case temperature of each processor model on both AMD and Intel processors. You can also Google your CPU’s model to determine the maximum temperature. When you get this number, you can compare it with your core temp readings.

If you see that they are near or core readings are exceeding your supposed to be “maximum limit” – you might need to add a heat sink or fan on your processor. On my old PC, the thermal paste conducting the heat sink and the core of the CPU was worn out and it caused the heat to build up on the CPU since the heat can’t reach the heat sink.

That was the time I learned the value of the thermal paste – it was a costly lesson so I hope you will not make this mistake when handling CPUs.

Got your own CPU temperature monitoring tips? Post them here on the comments section!