This free program offers some useful system details to those savvy enough to understand its results. SpeedFan’s tabbed interface isn’t hard to navigate, but most users won’t be able to make head or tail of the data this utility provides. The program’s system-tray icon tells you the temperature of your PC’s hard drive, and you can receive information on voltage and fan speeds. With something so simple, you will reduce unnecessary noise and unnecessary energy consumption.
The main viewing purpose of SpeedFan is to show its user what’s really going in their machine. When minimized, a temperature reading is showed on the button right of the desktop. When Speedfan is in an open window you can see a whole lot more. From Fan speed to total voltage, you can view any and all of the current fans. The utility can display SMART data and includes a tool for resetting motherboard clocks. Basically, if this review makes no sense to you, SpeedFan is above your head and won’t be worth downloading. However, PC technicians and those who like to do their own system maintenance might as well take a look at this application, particularly since it costs nothing.
Only a few hardware monitor chips do label their connectors with “CPU”, “System” and the like. Most of them use labels like “Temp1″, “Local” or “Remote”. The hardware manufacturers connect available pins to different temperature sensors basically according to the physical placement of components on the motherboard.
This means that the same chip, an ITE IT8712F, for example, might be connected to a sensor diode measuring CPU temperature on Temp2 and, on a different hardware, it might be connected on Temp1. If you have a “Local” sensor and a “Remote” labeled one, this usually means that “Local” is the temperature of the monitor chip itself and “Remote” is the temperature read from a “remote” probe. When you have properly identified which temperature sensor is which, try to lower the speed of each fan and look at reported speed and temperatures. If you do not allow SpeedFan to change any fan speed and set all the speeds too low, then SpeedFan won’t be able to avoid overheating.
