For GPU core temperatures, we prefer to keep those well south of 90C, but some GPUs tend to run warmer. With the above information in hand, you'll likely want to know if your graphics card is getting too hot or if it's running in an appropriate temperature range. How Hot Is Too Hot for Your Graphics Card?įrozen LN2 GPU (Image credit: Jean Michel 'Wizerty' Tisserand) The GDDR6X also hit a peak of 104C and basically sits at a sustained 102C, which is typical for the RTX 3090 Founders Edition. In our screenshot, we're running FurMark in the background, which is why the temperatures and hot spot figures are somewhat warm. HWiNFO helpfully reports minimum, maximum, and average figures for all monitored items.

But besides those idiosyncrasies, HWiNFO64 will quickly let you see how things are going with your PC's hardware.įire up a game or other graphics workload, run it for a while, and check the main window or the log file. The 'reset history' icon is even less clear, showing an analog clock. You can log data to a CSV, though the icon isn't particularly clear in this case - it's the ledger icon with the green plus-sign. We typically launch HWiNFO64 and use the sensors-only mode. Not many other utilities will do that, and GDDR6X thermals, in particular, can get a bit too high on some cards, especially if you happen to do any cryptocurrency mining. Perhaps the most important element of HWiNFO is that it also reports GDDR6 and GDDR6X temperatures for supported GPUs - basically the GeForce RTX 30-series and Radeon RX 6000-series. Not only can it check your graphics card temperatures, utilization, and clock speeds, but it can also show details for your CPU, motherboard, SSDs, and other hardware. HWiNFO is perhaps the most full-featured monitoring utility available. You can also right-click on the monitor screen and choose to log the values over time if you want a CSV file. It can monitor CPU clocks, temperatures, and utilization on a per-core basis if you're interested in that data. We used the v3 skin because we're old and don't like change or something. The hardware monitor portion of Afterburner can also be detached and enlarged, and numerous skins are also available. One nice aspect of Afterburner is that it shows the maximum value reached for the various sensors, so you can see that the GPU clocked at up to 1980 MHz, for example, while the temperature peaked at 73C. Notice how much lower the GPU clocks are with FurMark in order to keep power and thermals in check. The first part of the graph shows the card running Forza Horizon 5 for a while, then we exited and launched FurMark. The above screenshot (see how to take screenshots in Windows) shows GPU usage, temperature, core clock, and memory clock. While you can use MSI Afterburner for overclocking, our main purpose here is to look at its monitoring capabilities. You can also use MSI Afterburner to overclock your graphics card, but it doesn't report on as many system components, so it's not a bad idea to grab it along with one or both of the others.

We like the portable version of HWiNFO since we know where the files are and can overwrite them with updated versions as needed, but you can use either one. All three are free and support virtually every graphics card currently available. Multiple utilities will do the job, but we prefer using either MSI Afterburner, HWiNFO, or GPU-Z. You'll need a few things to determine your graphics card temperature. If you're one of those, checking your GPU temperatures before and after cleaning can be an enlightening experience. Many users might go many months or even years without cleaning out the dust buildup inside their PC, and the result can be higher temperatures, lower performance, or even component failure. High graphics card temperatures can also signal that something is wrong, and thankfully it's easy to quickly check how things are running. It's important to check your graphics card temperature periodically, whether you're using one of the best graphics cards or something a bit older and less potent.

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