SpeedFan allows you to have a deeper view of the status of your computer. Almost
every computer includes support for hardware monitoring. Accessing
digital temperature sensors
is really useful. If you are trying to figure out why your pc hangs when under heavy load
or after some hours of usage, SpeedFan might help you to find the real cause. Very often it is a poor
power supply, or an improperly installed heatsink that lead to behaviours that we tend to associate
with errors from the operating system, but that are not. SpeedFan automatically searches your computer
for interesting chips: the hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan can expose
voltages,
fan speeds and
temperatures. On rare occasions, the BIOS doesn't activate
such features. SpeedFan tries to enable them as long as this is a safe thing to do. Not only the
motherboard is searched, but also some video cards and almost every recent hard disk. SpeedFan can
access status info from EIDE, SATA and even
SCSI drives, showing, in a consistent way,
internal data that can be used to diagnose current and future hard disk failures. This is known as
S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology). At the lowest level, SpeedFan is an hardware monitor
software that can access digital temperature sensors, but its main feature is
that it can
control fan speeds according to the temperatures inside your pc, thus
reducing noise.