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FREE: SpeedFan – CPU and hard disk temperature monitoring

It’s summertime in the northern hemisphere, and the high outdoor temperatures can make your computers sweat as well. SpeedFan is a free tool that allows you to monitor the temperature of various hardware components and take measures if certain limits are reached. The latter feature is also useful for servers.

SpeedFan monitors the temperature of processor cores, GPUs (Graphical Processing Units), and hard disks. It can also measure motherboard voltages and the speed (in RPM) of your CPU fan, chassis fan, and power fan.

Measuring the voltages and fan speed didn’t work on my Dell laptop using Vista x64, even though, SpeedFan officially supports 64-bit systems with signed drivers. Monitoring the hard disk temperature only worked after I started the tool as administrator.

You can also use SpeedFan to adjust your fan speed, if your motherboard supports it. The tool enables you to change other settings of your motherboard, such as the CPU clock, but I would be very cautious with such features, because it is possible to destroy computer components this way.

What is more interesting is the tool’s ability to inform you or take measures when certain events occur. For example, SpeedFan can send an email or run a program if the CPU has reached a certain temperature. SpeedFan also monitors quite a few hard disk conditions. Examples are "seek error rate" or "calibration retry count." In this way, you can also use SpeedFan to identify hard drives that could cause problems in the future.

I tested SpeedFan 4.38 for this review.

SpeedFan