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One of the pillars of good PC custodianship is ensuring all your gear isn’t running out of spec, which can cause slowdowns, crashes, and frustration. The chief culprit for something running too hot is the CPU, as it’s always active when you’re using your computer, and when stressed, the heat it generates can sometimes overload the attached cooler even if you thoughtfully specced your system.
Today’s CPUs can run exceedingly hot, requiring both constant vigilance and a beefy cooler, and this is especially true for folks who might be harboring any overclocking fantasies. Thankfully, checking the temperatures of your CPU is easy to do, and there’s a great selection of free utilities out there that will let you examine your CPU’s temps to ensure they’re within an acceptable range.
Before we dive in, we should state that it doesn’t matter if you have an Intel or AMD CPU, as both companies embed temperature sensors in their chips that can be read by any utility that requests this information. The motherboard constantly monitors those sensors while you’re using your PC. If they exceed acceptable levels, the system will just turn off to avoid damaging the CPU. PCs today also won’t boot if you don’t have a CPU fan attached to the appropriate fan header on the motherboard, so CPU temperatures are serious business.
Here’s a quick guide for what you should be looking for when you fire up one of the utilities below and see your CPU’s temperatures.
Idle Temp: This is when you’re not stressing your CPU with a PC game or application, so just using Windows. This temp will be based on the ambient temperature in your room, but you should expect temps between 30C to 40C typically.
Full-Load Temp: This will vary greatly, but you generally want to keep your CPU below 80C in most scenarios. Intel and AMD CPUs can hit 95C or thereabouts when all cores are under full load, but that’s the upper limit for a modern processor. Though both companies will state that its spec allows it to run at those temps just fine, you should try to keep that down to around 80C to prolong its lifespan.
With that out of the way, here are the best free utilities to examine the temps on your own.
NZXT CAM
This is a free utility designed to be used with NZXT’s coolers, but it works fine on any hardware and is free to boot. It has a simple interface that shows your CPU’s temp in real-time, along with your CPU’s maximum boost clock and current CPU usage.
The CAM is free, and you can even dock a tiny version to your desktop to keep an eye on things 24/7.
Credit: NZXT
If you click the module with the CPU information, it’ll expand to show you more details about your chip’s operation, including a line graph of CPU usage over time. The best feature of CAM is that you can go into settings and choose a “mini” mode, which will show you real-time monitoring data in a handy little applet you can put anywhere on your desktop to keep an eye on things while you’re working. CAM will also show you the specs of your entire system, which can be useful at times.
Core Temp
This small, no-frills utility is great for everyone because it’s responsive, has a small footprint, and tells you exactly what you need to know with no filler or extraneous data. It can monitor your CPU temp in real-time along with power consumption, which is very useful for determining how much certain applications are taxing your system. The only downside is you must be vigilant when installing it, as it will ask you to install some crapware, so just be cautious.
This handy little app is small, fast, and shows you only what’s important; e.g. temps and power consumption.
Credit: Core Temp
Even better, this is an app that can live in your system tray, so you don’t need it to clog up your desktop with an app that’s always open. You can set it to display all your cores’ temperatures or just the hottest one if you want to have one number instead of a dozen.
Core Temp can also reside in your system tray, giving you CPU temps at a glance.
Credit: Core Temp
Double-clicking the system tray icon makes the app appear, and if you double-click the app itself, it goes into “mini” mode, which hides some of the CPU information. It’s an easy-to-use, well-made app that everyone should try out.
HWINFO
This is for the true hardware nerds out there who want to see everything, including voltages, fan speeds, you name it. This free utility looks like it was designed by engineers, but note that you can collapse any branches in the UI you don’t care about to simplify things. It also shows you CPU temperatures on a per-core basis, plus clock speeds, voltages, and temps and data for your storage devices.
This is a handy and accurate tool but its UI is not the friendliest.
Credit: HWINFO
There’s no mystery here; just run the program and look for the relevant section labeled “Temperatures.”
How to Stress Your CPU
Underlying all of this monitoring is a simple question: What temps does your CPU reach when under a heavy load? After all, that’s what counts here, not idle temps. If you want to burden your CPU to ensure your cooler is up to snuff, here are three ways to do it. Two are platform agnostic, and one is for Intel CPUs only.
Cinebench R23
This “real world” CPU stress test will peg your CPU at 100% load for as long as the test runs. It’s a great way to see what your CPU cooler can do in the worst possible scenario. This app is free, and once you have it open, you can select either single-core or multi-core to render a scene. Once you click either button, it’ll begin a 3D render that will tax your CPU at 100%, so for a true torture test, click “multi-core,” as that will give you the actual maximum temperature your CPU will reach using your current cooler.
Click “multi-core” if you really want to put some heat on your chip.
Credit: Maxon
As you can see in the screenshot above, your author’s CPU hit 81C on two cores highlighted in yellow by Core Temp to show they are “getting toasty.” But for most of the test, the 13600KF was running at around 75C, which is a great temperature for this test. This test will take several minutes to complete, but you should see your CPU temps go up immediately after it starts.
Prime95
This is a synthetic test that has been around for ages. Since it’s synthetic, it’s not “real world,” but it will test both your CPU and memory to their absolute maximum, so it’s still valid for testing your CPU cooler and your system stability. Back in the day, we’d run this test for 24 hours to make sure a new build was stable, as it puts quite a burden on the system.
This utility has been around since the olden days but it’s still quite useful for getting a CPU piping hot.
Credit: Prime95
Once you start the app, you’ll see several options, but we usually choose the middle one labeled “In-Place Large FFTs,” which tests both the CPU and memory. You can also select the “custom” mode if you want to tweak the settings a bit, but for a one-and-done test, just use the middle option. Note that your system will be very slow when running this test as the CPU will be pegged to the floor, so be sure to use the system tray icon to stop the test, then the same icon to quit the program.
Intel eXtreme Tuning Utility
If you have an Intel processor, this is a great free utility to stress test your CPU. Not only will it peg your CPU to 100% load for however long you want the test to run, but it will also tell you if your CPU is suffering from thermal or power throttling—the latter being when the CPU needs more power but isn’t getting it from the motherboard.
Intel XTU is an often forgotten utility made by Intel to stress test its CPUs.
Credit: Intel
It is a great utility to examine how your processor behaves under stress, as you can see what each core is doing and its temps over time. It will also “auto overclock” the CPU for you, but use caution with this, as we typically recommend changing overclocking settings in the BIOS where you have finer control over each setting.
This concludes our quick look at the best ways to measure your CPU’s temperature. If you run these tests and find things are getting too hot for your liking, consider upgrading your CPU cooler, undo any overclocking that might be applied, or both. If neither of those actions reduces your temps enough, you might need to upgrade your cooler to a beefy air cooler or a liquid cooling setup. You might also want to examine the airflow in your case, as that’s an essential component of keeping your PC’s internals cool.