Best Temperature Gauge?

[Reloadron]

Originally Posted by vrbbmf

now that the comedy is out of the way,
who knows what hardware i could use to get accurate temps on internal components;
cpu, gpu, psu, nb, etc.
and
is there a multimeter with temp capabilitues
that might do the trick?

The gauge was sort of funny. OK, on a more serious note yes, Core Temp is very good as to providing accuracy. Discounting the errors that are the nature of the beast Core Temp will get you within a few degrees C which is pretty good. The merit being it gives you a look at "Core Temp" and the core(s) are what you care about.

Next, yes there are a variety of DMMs that include a temperature probe. These probes are designed for measuring surface temperatures. They are nice if you just want to look at the surface temperature of your RAM chips for example. They also feature other probes for measuring general air temperature so if you are curious as to air inlet temp (ambient) versus air outlet temp you can measure it. DMMs that do this can be had from relatively inexpensive to holy shit it cost that much.

Back to the accuracy thing. Though it is important to have some degree of accuracy for a base reading, the main concern is generally the "Delta" temperature. CPU under no real load and CPU running 100% on all cores (if multi core). How much increase? Does a machine run stable under no load and full load? If a machine runs stable under no load but... becomes very unstable under full load then temperatures are a good place to start looking for the problem. You care about the delta.

Ron

[PrOLifIC_onE]

The thing you might want to look for is a Fan Controller with thermal sensors and a LCD readout. Maybe something like these Lian Li or Scythe offerings. I can not attest to these 2 being good products but both companies are fairly well respected.

The thing is that many of these type of fan controllers do have issues. My experiences have been hit or miss AND many of them have a wide range of customer reviews. I'm not sure why, maybe some of the circuitry is shoddy or something. I think users just need to give them some TLC, connect the wires properly and make sure they aren't around any static electricity (anyone working on computers should be grounding themselves first anyway, at minimal by touching something metal before touching hardware).

There. Thats my non-comic response.