Core Temp, user manual and secrets for your CPU

Core Temp is a program that stands out for its small size and almost zero consumption of resources that gives us real-time information on the temperature of the processor and for this they use a telemetry system included in the CPUs called DTS o Digital thermal sensor, which provides continuous temperature readings to different processor cores and writes them to an address in a variable stored in RAM.

What Core Temp does with this data is show it to us in real time so that we know what the thermal health of our Intel Core, AMD Ryzen is, but it’s not just what it takes into account. loads the most recent processors, but it can measure the temperature of series as old as the first Pentium Intel, in the case of AMD processors of the K8 architecture and if we have a VIA brand processor of the Nano or C7 series we can also use it.

How to install it

The first thing is to make sure that we are using the correct operating system, because this tool has versions for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, Server 2003, Server 2008, Server 2012, Server 2016. It therefore has no version for GNU / Linux and neither for macOS.

Since it is a completely free program, just go to its website and click on the huge hyperlink given by Download to download the latest version of Core Temp. If you are very bad at the language of Shakespeare, you have language packs and translation tools if you click on More downloads, as well as previous versions of the program.

The download is a file called Core-Temp-Setup.exe, which is very lightweight and will be downloaded in the blink of an eye. Since it is an executable, you just need to open it to start the installation process. The first thing it will do will be ask us if we give it permission to install it and then it will let us choose the language, we will choose English, because the rest is not intelligible to average Spanish.

What follows is the classic installation, where we will only have to accept the terms of the license and choose in which folder we will install the program. We recommend that you leave only the check mark that creates a desktop shortcut, the second one downloads and installs a game that we don’t want. We can also choose to install additional language packs and the Core Temp Remote Server add-on which allows us to monitor the PC temperature when we are not around.

The Core Temp window

Core Temp will give us the information of our processor with the following data:

• Select the processor: It lets us select which processor we want it to measure, if there is more than one, and it tells us how many cores and execution threads it has.
• Model: It informs us of the CPU model we have installed on the PC or the one we have chosen to monitor, as well as the architecture, which is put in brackets.
• Platform: the type of plug used.
• Frequency: It gives us the frequency or the clock speed, this one is scalable since it gives us the information of each of the clock cycles in operation in an interlaced way.
• TO: It works as in the previous point, but with tension.
• Revision: the stepping of the CPU we are using, which would be like editing a book, but with a processor.
• Lithography: the knot where it was made.
• Processor ID: the identification code of the CPU.
• TDP: what is explicit, it indicates the maximum energy consumption that the processor can reach.

Even if what really interests us is the lower part where the application gives us the reading information in real time, the value Tj. Max is fixed and will not vary. This is the temperature that your PC’s processor takes care of before it reaches throttling or thermal drowning, at which point it will stop functioning properly.

The wattage line shows the power consumption in watts of each of the cores, starting with core # 0, which is from first to last. As for the rows of each Core, they indicate the average temperature, minimum, maximum and workload level of each CPU core.

Switch to mini-mode

If we go to the options menu and select Toggle Mini Mode, we can see a shortened version of the information that will take up less screen space.

Program options

We are faced with an extremely simple program, it is not for this reason that it lacks options, for that we only have to go to the menu, to the part that says Options and click on The settings, when we open it, we will see that a window with several tabs opens.

The most important of all is the general tab, in which we can choose:

• If we want the program to use plug-ins or add-ons
• It starts when the PC starts up.
• We can have it run multiple instances of the program in case we have to measure several different processors on a server.
• We can also make it start with Windows or check for updates.

Although the most important part of all is that we can adjust how often the processor temperature information should be provided.

The other tab to highlight is the notification area, in which we can how we want the program to give us the information. The rest of the tabs are completely optional and do not improve the use of the program, in any case we will define them below:

• The Advanced tab is of little use to us, since the three options that allow us to choose do not improve temperature tracking.
• The Logitech tab is totally disaffected which comes from the first versions of the program, so we will not touch it either.
• Windows task bar On the other hand, it allows us to use the Windows 7 taskbar to display information, if we are not using this operating system or a higher one, that will not be useful either. In it, we can do it from the taskbar, we can see real-time information about temperature, frequency, CPU load and cycle between the different modes as a function of time.
• Display It will show us simple configurations based on checkboxes and buttons. We see the temperature in degrees of each nucleus Fahrenheit, start the program minimized, close it in the area of notification or hide the degrees.

Activates overheating protection

As for the rest of the menu item options, we need to start gap which allows us to affect the variation on the temperature measurement, this is used when we know that this one is not given correctly by the DTS inside the processor. Overheating protection On the other hand, it allows us to configure a warning signal when the processor is dangerously approaching the thermal drowning temperature, this is the most important window, since it allows us among other things to:

• Assign the temperature at which the notification is activated and how it is given.
• It allows us to run an external program, which will attempt to run once the critical point is reached.
• We can put the PC to sleep, hibernate or disconnect completely after a certain number of seconds.

We hope that the tutorial has been useful to you and that you can use it to make your overclocking exercises more bearable and safe.