HWMonitor

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on September 28, 2010

Keeping track of your system's temperature and operating conditions just makes good sense, especially since today's hardware makes it so easy, with a little help from programs like HWMonitor from CPUID. It's a handy, free tool for monitoring the built-in temperature sensors in your CPU, motherboard, video card, and other devices, as well as your hard drives' S.M.A.R.T. data, system fan speeds, and critical operating data like voltages. It can access most sensor chips and onboard thermal sensors, and it's even compatible with special hardware sensors in some components, including mainboard and power supply monitoring technology from Abit, Gigabyte, and others.

When you install HWMonitor, you can choose to install the Ask search toolbar; deselecting its EULA notification in the installer doesn't affect HWMonitor's installation. We chose not to install the Ask toolbar. HWMonitor opened with all compatible sensor data in our PC displayed in a tabbed tree view in the software's dialog interface, including voltages, temperatures, and fan speeds for our Asus motherboard's onboard Winbond sensor and core temperatures for our Intel CPU. There's a file menu with some basic entries, including a Help file that only offers access to an upgraded, for-pay version, but HWMonitor's mission is simple, and so are its options. It won't alert you to under- or over-voltages or excessive temperatures; you'll have to keep an eye on things. But it does help you do that!

There are several hardware monitoring utilities available online, some of them free, like HWMonitor, and some offering more or less the same level of capabilities. We've used HWMonitor before, though, and always found it a simple but accurate monitoring tool that we can recommend without reservation.