Ive 4 questions 1. Is it true that the majority of PC's today incorporate a hardware health monitoring chip on their motherboard? (Winibond IT8712F etc) 2. Ive read that a thermal diode resides on the processor die. Does the heath monitoring chip access this temperture reading? 3. Other accessible tempertures include the HDD temperture as well as an external ambient temperture reading. Are these accessed by the health monitoring chip from external sensors on the motherboard in a similiar way? 4. Ivve read the sensors are used primarily as a fail-safe to disable the processor in case it exceeds a certain temperature. Is there any other reasons for them? Thanks in advance
1. yes, I belive most do 2. i can get the temp of my CPU so i guess so.... 3. I think its different... im not too sure, allthough i belive that S.M.A.R.T has to be enabled on the drive/bios 4. Yeah their there so the mobo can cut out if things go nuts and/or display a warning (you can set that in the bios). there also usefull if you overclock, as you can monitor temps and volts & Amps of the different rails on the power supply also makes a good screen saver...
1.)Yes. 2.)All modern x86-based (Pentium, Athlon) processors have this implemented. How accurate they are, I'm not sure. 3.)Not all hard drives have temperature monitoring, but if they do, a sensor is integrated onto the drive, likely on the controller board residing on the drive itself. 4.)Like previously explained, they're used to monitor voltages as well. Processors have the ability to clock themselves down if the temperature gets too hot. If that fails to sufficiently drop the temps, the failsafe will shut the computer off. A word of caution: the sensors are not necesarily accurate, particularly with voltages as they are not being read directly from the power supply rails. Accurate results can be obtained by using a multimeter (preferrably digital). Temperature readings should also be taken with a grain of salt, as offset values for the motherboard temps are given calibrated adjustments that are subject to being affected by airflow to a particular area.
