Monitoring hardware temperatures is necessary procedure for many users and it is carried out on a daily basis by most of them, in order to maintain and protect the health of the system. What's more, by tweaking various voltage and temperature parameters, excessive heat can be restrained from damaging your system.
SpeedFan was crafted for this purpose in particular. It monitors temperatures from various sources, allowing you to adjust the speed fans based on the degrees Celsius that your hardware indicates. The program also has the capability to monitor S.M.A.R.T. readings for EIDE, SATA and SCSI hard disks and RAID controllers.
Installing SpeedFan is a simple operation that requires only a couple of seconds. Its tabbed interface allows you to view the information in categories, while the system tray indicator displays the temperatures from the hard disk and cores.
SpeedFan also shows the CPU usage and allows you to configure the fan and voltage settings in according with the detected temperatures. In addition, it offers you the possibility to adjust the processor clock values based on various usage scenarios.
The S.M.A.R.T. feature performs an in-depth analysis on your hard disk and reports various indicators of reliability, thus enabling you to anticipate system failures.
Also worth mentioning is the section that generates charts, thus allowing you to better visualize the temperature, fan speeds and voltages of your hard disk and cores.
All in all, SpeedFan offers you extensive CPU and hard-disk temperature info and enables you to control fan speeds for the proper functioning of your computer hardware.
As a side note, SpeedFan is mostly an application for the power user, because its configuration is complex and can mislead those less experienced.
Read an in-depth analysis in our professional review for SpeedFan