Core Temp

So while your testing that new overclock with prime95, and you've used speedfan to monitor temps and fan speeds. But what if you need a smaller program to do that, and you don't need the fan speeds? Or what if you need to know what voltage the motherboard suggests but want to set it yourself? What if you need constant clockspeed monitoring and temperature logging? Or what if you need a temperature monitor that will work with a Core 2 Quad? This is what Core Temp is for.

This is a sample reading on my system, running some other stuff in the background(online videos and other things). The key is the corrected T-junction, which is changed from the Core 2 Duos to the Core 2 Quads. The monitoring interval can be changed through the settings, and the T-junction can be altered if you think you have a better idea of what it is.

Needless to say, a read interval of 10ms is a bit crazy. You can also read the temperature of each core in the taskbar.

This is great, especially if you have multiple cores.

Setting the T-junction offset to 10C bumps the temperatures read on each core up 10C.

As you can see in the settings, there is a plugin architecture in Core Temp. There are some basic plugins on the Core Temp website.

1. Core Temp Grapher: This plugin is a beta, but it seems to work fine. It graphs temperature and cpu usage.

2. Core Temp Sidebar Gadget: This just adds Core Temp data to a sidebar gadget(along with memory usage).

Core Temp is available here. Addons are available here.

CPU Burn-in

While Prime95 is really one of the best ways to stress test a cpu, cpu burn-in is great for just heating a processor. When a simple temperature reading is needed to determine if a particular clockspeed is a viable option, CPU Burn-in is a small and easy program to accomplish this.

Like Prime95, error checking is an option, and unlike Prime95, tests can be timed to stop after a certain period of time. Each instance is one thread, and multiple instances can be started. The only con I have found with this program is that while it keeps the processor at 100%, it does not create as much heat as Prime95. This program is only 20KB, and is available here.

Prime95

When overclocking, its necessary to stress test to determine the stability of any system. This is where cpu stress testing comes in. Prime95 is generally considered the best stress testing program for overclockers. When increasing clockspeed and voltage, errors can be introduced in a processor's output. Prime95 has a torture test mode which checks prime testing calculations against known results. A good way to run tests is to run a 15min small fft test on a certain clockspeed, and up the speed if there is no error. Once an error occurs at a specific speed, lower the speed and run a 30min test. If its stable, run a 2 hour test. If there is an issue, lower the speed again and repeat. If its stable, run a 24hour test. Any issues and the speed should be lowered, no issues for 24hours usually means that the speed is stable.

Prime95 can also join the distributed computing search for mersenne primes(primes of the form 2^n -1).

Prime95 25.6
Official Download Site(version 24)