Temperature Measurements?

[dfrost]

How are you measuring your various temperatures that aren't provided directly from the mobo?

I see frequent references in these forums to Case and HDD temperatures, and it isn't obvious how you're getting those. I'm aware that the higher end VGA's have temperature sensor chips, but my 9600 Pro isn't one of those.

My Abit AI7 mobo provides CPU, PVM and System temperatures with the uGuru package. Is the System temperature is in the vicinity of the NB?

Not sure if this is the best forum for this question. Please redirect me if appropriate.

[NeilBlanchard]

Hello & welcome:

Either the Motherboard Monitor or SpeedFan programs can give you these temps, if they support your motherboard (for the case temps) and if you have S.M.A.R.T. enabled on your HD. I'm not sure if there are any SATA drives that support S.M.A.R.T., but most IDE drives do.

[nici]

I can say that the SpinPoint P80, Diamondmax 9 and the barracuda all report temps when using DTemp, all tree drives are SATA. Search google for "dtemp" and you will come up with a nice little utility that, if supported by your HDD, will report the temperature.

About case temps, you need some kind of probe obviously. Some fan controllers measure temperature, though i can say the akasa fan controller pro i had measured temperature way over its actual value so i cant say its any good for accurate measuring. Then there is the point and measure laser thingies, wich would be good for heatsink measuring for example but these dont come cheap. Thats just a few examples, you can of course measure computer temps with any kind of equipment that you would normally use for temperature monitoring..

[Jan Kivar]

I'm not sure if there are any SATA drives that support S.M.A.R.T., but most IDE drives do.

I've mentioned the problems with SATA and SMART in this post.

Cheers,

Jan

[dfrost]

OK, I downloaded Speedfan, and can now see both HDD temps (Seagate 7200.7 SATA and Maxtor PATA) which are gratifyingly hovering around 30-31 under light use. I also see "Temp1" which is identified as ACPI temperature showing rock-solid at 20. Where is ACPI measured?

I've got Abit's uGuru running which shows CPU, Sys and PVM temps (idling at 34, 29, and 35, respectively), and the CPU fan (Zalman 7000B) speed, controlled by both a Fanmate and Abit's FanEQ. I've disabled the NB fan since going to passive NB cooling. Sys fan speed reads "Off" in uGuru even when the intake fan is plugged into the SysFan header on the AI7 mobo, so I'm using "Fan Only" for both case fans' speed control.

Speedfan can probably control the fans better, but I am unable to view anything there that is now in uGuru. Is there any way to get these temps and speed to read out in Speedfan?

I'm still not clear wher the "Case" temperature is measured.

[Tibors]

I'm still not clear wher the "Case" temperature is measured.

There is no hard rule about case temps. On some motherboards there is a temp sensor in good location. (I think your Sys or ACPI might be it.) On some other motherboards the "Case" or Sys temp sensor is located close to the northbridge or some other hot component. Most of the time you don't know where the temp sensors on the motherboard are. A more accurate method is using the temp sensors on a wire that come with some fan controllers.

Considering all this, you can see mentioning your case temps without telling how you get them is not very usefull. Still a lot of people don't tell that, making most reported case temps useless for drawing any conclusion. But your disk, CPU, NB and videocard temps are far more important than the case temp, so it is not really a problem.