Your preferred thermal monitoring suite?

[creative]

While there are basic command line tools you can use to check out sensors like "watch -p -t -n .5 sensors" or checking out your cpu's line of thread frequencies with "watch -p -t -n .5 grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo".

What are some utilities that you like the most? I know of oldies like gkrellm with sensor support, but when it comes to actually providing a histogram type function while showing current thermals, peak, and low temperature hits, I have yet to find anything more customizable and replete as psensor. I have been using it for years, sadly it seems to be unmaintained since about 2020.

In order to compile it from source I actually had to correct a very small part of it to get it to build. This did not bother me at all, I actually enjoyed it but I lack major coding skills.

Here is the source https://gitlab.com/jeanfi/psensor/-/releases. A lot of distributions already have it in their repositories which is a good thing.

I have yet to find a better thermal monitor. Psensor is an awesome project.

Just curious what other people use.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Didn't know about psensor, thanks!

I usually either use a Conky script that I've been using for... oh, going on 7 years now, or btop.

[creative]

If I didn't have Psensor I would most likely be using mangohud for monitoring stuff while I game, its nice to have something like Psensor setting off and away logging high and low temperature hits. I would also be using those simple command lines for monitoring software and shader compilation.

I have been slowly working on trying to figure out a way to develop something that logs the highs and lows for CPU, NVME, and GPU thermals like Psensor. So far as I have found Psensor is the only thermal app that does it. It's going to be a while before I even get close to figuring something out to make it seems.

I have been using a stripped down version of gkrellm elongated in a histogram fashion to show process, eth0, and lo activity that looks pretty nice. I keep Psensor, Htop, Gkrellm, Jack Control and nvidia-settings all on one screen.

Going to have to check out btop never heard of it but it looks pretty nice. I like using Htop to search through and manage certain processes. It's kind of nice to have one screen dedicated to all this stuff. Each time I log into XFCE4 it's all there on one screen.

[creative]

Paradigm Shifter Btop is definitely a nice to have. I'm digging it. Thanks

[Paradigm Shifter]

Paradigm Shifter Btop is definitely a nice to have. I'm digging it. Thanks

No worries. Happy to have shared it.

btop would be perfect for me if it would also do some basic GPU monitoring. I'm less worried about the "pretty" ASCII graphs for CPU, but would like to see utilisation, temps etc on my GPUs at the same time (I know, I know, multiple terminal windows...)

[creative]

Paradigm Shifter gkrellm is very old but very useful. It's not the prettiest thing but can be tailored as a decent utility. Back in the day most people had it up on their desktops for a bit of utility but mostly looks I believe, that could be a premature assessment that I am making though. I'm fairly utilitarian when it comes to stuff.

What I have here is a nice place too see what kind of activity is going on with my system. Not that I am noid but in the event I see something unusual I can fire up wireshark and start capturing.

It would be extremely unlikely though, I mainly use it to study my systems behavior with certain apps like steam. It's pretty interesting what some games send out while I am playing them.

There is a certain game I saw some pretty interesting stuff with this, when I was in-game---I checked out the user agreement.
After reading the agreement it absolutely blew my mind. Certain publishers will go to great lengths to blegh.

I now refuse any further business with certain parts of the gaming industry.

[creative]

I am getting in further with this.

watch -p -t -n .5 "grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo && sensors && nvidia-smi"

That's a much more interesting command line that I figured out. On my setup I actually had to zoom out to see the whole thing with xfce4-terminal. That right there shows you quite a bit of course if you have an AMD or Intel GPU you can just omit nvidia-smi and just have
watch -p -t -n .5 "grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo && sensors"

[Paradigm Shifter]

Thanks creative, I'll try it out when I get back to the other side of the world...

[Guest]

psensor

[creative]

last year or so ive been using Hwinfo64 for monitoring temps, but recently after upgrading my system ive noticed the idle temps between Hwinfo64 and Ryzen Master are very different, but strangly they both agree on the load temps.
So which one should i stick with?

Idle :
Hwinfo64 - 40 - 45c
Ryzen Mas - 33 - 40c

Load:
Both agree.
Prime 95 - 75c

What I do know is that for certain Ryzen CPU's some monitoring software can be off by up to 10° Celsius. I don't know what hardware you have.

In one software one might show the total package temp in the form of an average between the hotspot and some other sensor. It's a question of tdie's or tccd's. I believe you should look at both, tccd will be the coolest and top out the hottest. Tdie/Tctl behaves more like an average at any given moment.

I only used Ryzen Master once just to check it out, it may behave more in favor of AMD, Hwinfo64 from an engineers point of view 'shows voltages, power draw, PCH temp etc. may be a better bet.

I had to edit my post a bit, to answer your question Hwinfo64 is most likely going to be your best bet and is engineered monitoring software for not only the CPU but much more, when I do monitoring in windows which is extremely rare, that is my preference. I only boot into to Windows now and again to apply security updates, just doing that I'm always left aghast. Just not my thing, I find it too boring. If it's yours more power to you, Windows away!