How to check your GPU temperature without fuss

Your graphics card already reports its temperatures to its driver, and Pulse by Zaweba reads them from there as a normal user and shows them on its Temperatures page. You get the GPU core, the hot spot and the memory temperature where the card reports them, each coloured normal, warm or hot. There is no administrator prompt and no extra driver to install for the GPU readings.

Windows' own Task Manager can show a GPU temperature on some systems, but only a single figure with no history. Many dedicated tools want administrator rights or a low-level driver just to start. Pulse keeps the GPU side simple.

Where to look

Open Pulse and go to the Temperatures page from the View menu or with Ctrl+2. The GPU has its own tiles. Each tile shows the reading, where it came from, and a band with the warm and hot thresholds written on it, so you don't have to remember what is normal for your card.

The default bands for a GPU are 75 and 85 degrees C for the core, and 85 and 95 degrees C for the hot spot. Below the first figure the tile reads normal, between them warm, and above the second hot. The hot spot is the warmest point the card measures, so it naturally runs higher than the core.

Making sense of the readings

A single number at a quiet desktop tells you little. What matters is how the card behaves under load. Start a game or a video export, then watch the tiles. A healthy card climbs and settles. One that keeps rising into the hot band, or whose hot spot runs far above its core, may have a dust problem or poor airflow.

The Live page helps too. It has a GPU column showing each app's GPU use, taken from Windows' GPU engine counters, and a GPU graph for the whole PC. Put the two pages together and you can see which program is driving the temperature.

Keeping a record

Pulse records every sensor's peak and average each minute in its history, which it keeps for 30 days by default. On the History page, choose Today, Yesterday or This week and look at the temperature peaks list. Each peak comes with the three busiest apps in that minute. That is how you find out what the card was doing during last night's gaming session without having watched it.

If you'd like a warning instead, the Alerts page has a temperature alert that is on by default. It fires when a sensor stays past its threshold for five seconds. Leave the value at 0 to use the sensor's own hot band, or type a fixed figure in degrees C if you prefer your own limit.

Other temperatures

NVMe drive temperatures are also read without administrator rights. CPU package and core temperatures, the motherboard sensors and fan speeds need the optional sensor helper, which you turn on in Settings > Sensor readings. Windows asks for permission, and a small helper starts that only reads sensors and stops when Pulse closes. CPU and board sensors also need the free PawnIO driver.

For GPU readings alone, none of that is required. Install Pulse by Zaweba, open the Temperatures page, and the card's figures are there. It costs nothing, needs no account and sends nothing off your PC.