Newbee questions

[tommytiko]

I am very pleased to find RealTemp, and have installed the latest stable verskion. But there are some questions:

1. RealTemp appears to be presented as supporting all Intel chips, but my laptop, which has a Pentium 4, gives an error message that seems to say that the cpu is not supported. Is Pentium 4 supported?

2. Another well known temperature monitoring program purports to throttle down a cpu to an extent that can be determined by the user when the cpu reaches a temperature that can be determined by the user. Is this a genuine feature, and if so is it something that RealTemp will develop?

3. Are the maximum temperatures the result of the software detecting which chip is fitted and empirical information about what temperatue the chip will fail at?

4. My desktop has an I7, which I gather has 8 cores. But the software seems to monitor only 4 cores. Is this because the I7 is not fully supported yet?

5. Is calibration required?

 

[BazookaJoe]

4.) An i7 only has 4 cores , and 2 THREADS for each core. Windows basically has 8 "ports" available to send the instructions to, however there are only 4 actual processor cores.

 

[unclewebb]

1) Pentium 4 is not supported.

2) RealTemp allows you to manually throttle a CPU to reduce its temperature if you need that feature. I can't think of a need off hand for RealTemp to do this automatically. All Intel CPUs automatically thermal throttle when they start running too hot so I just let the CPU be in charge of looking after itself.

3) On the Core i7 CPUs, Intel writes TJMax information into each core of each CPU. RealTemp reads this information and then reads the temperature sensors and computes the temperature with this information and this simple formula:

Reported Temperature = TJMax - Digital Thermal Sensor rerading

4) i7 has 8 threads but only 4 cores so there is only 4 temperature sensors for RealTemp to report.

5) On a Core i7, the temperature are usually close enough that I wouldn't bother trying to calibrate them. Just start up RealTemp and away you go.

Here's the latest beta version that I'm just testing out.
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/3/3/1794507/RealTempBeta.zip