How accurate is speedfan?

kamalaggi said:

I ran a stress test on my CPU using heavyload and my temps seem a bit too low in speedfan.

What was the ambient temperature? Did the heatsink have heat pipes?

Speedfan hasn't been updated in many years now, to the point where it hasn't supported my last two motherboards. I used to use it to provide temps and fan speeds to my LCD Smartie display, but it became a crap shoot with my old motherboard and my new motherboard won't even work with it at all. On top of that, Speedfan wouldn't run at startup in Windows 10 unless I did some serious fiddling around to get past the UAC warning screens and start up effectively. Even when I did hold my tongue just right, Speedfan would only load about one out of five times from a fresh boot.

I switched to HWInfo64 and I haven't looked back.

Gurn Blanston said:

I did some serious fiddling around to get past the UAC warning screens

It is very easy to get past the warning via an elevated shortcut: How to Add Create Elevated Shortcut to New Context Menu in Windows 10

Gurn Blanston said:

Speedfan hasn't been updated in many years now, to the point where it hasn't supported my last two motherboards.

Same here on my latest PC (late 2018), but otherwise works on all vns of Windows I have tried, including W10. A few years back I was sufficiently motivated by SF's results to write my own program (in C) to access my multi-io chip (Winbond W83627) - this was easy enough (reading from and writing to io ports) as I found io chip info on-line - and I got exactly the values that SF did (no calibration involved at all).

I was disappointed to be unable to discover anything helpful about my current multi-io chip (IT 8686E) that would enable me to read it, so have not pursued the matter. Its a Gigabyte MB, and I think they deliberately restrict access to info about it - shame! But clearly some people have the necessary know-how, as multiple hardware monitors can work with it. Of those I have tried, HWinfo64 is my favourite for reading values, but none (that I know of) allow fan speed control. The Gigabyte utility is pretty useless IMHO.

When it comes to fan speed control, the only option is SpeedFan. Hopefully, an alternative will appear in the future.

IMPORTANT - CPU Core Temperature Measuring - Facts & Fictions | HWiNFO Forum

Matthew Wai said:

It is very easy to get past the warning via an elevated shortcut: How to Add Create Elevated Shortcut to New Context Menu in Windows 10

It works well in theory. In practice, not so much.

Can you explain why "not so much"? My SpeedFan starts automatically at Windows startup without a UAC warning screen every day.

Matthew Wai said:

What was the ambient temperature? Did the heatsink have heat pipes?

Ambient temperature is around 20 degrees. Just checked my bios and the temperatures are similar so I guess my temps are accurate in speedfan .

I've never really looked at the cpu temps I only looked when I swapped my cooler from a Corsair H110i to the CRYORIG H5 Universal 140 mm CPU Cooler last month.

I fitted my Corsair H110i back in just to test and the temperatures were in the 50's idle and in the 60's full load. That's a huge difference from my new CRYORIG H5.

Matthew Wai said:

Can you explain why "not so much"? My SpeedFan starts automatically at Windows startup without a UAC warning screen every day.

After much struggling to get Speedfan to run at startup, I resorted to using task scheduler to run Speedfan with elevated privilege at startup, from information that I got from a tutorial here on this site.

I found it to be hit or miss, and in reality, Speedfan would only start one time out of five boots (or worse). Nothing I tried would get it to start reliably.