Setting up the temperature alert in Pulse by Zaweba
The temperature alert in Pulse by Zaweba fires when a sensor stays past its threshold for 5 seconds. Use the sensor's own hot band or set degrees C.
Nobody wants to stare at temperature readings all day. The temperature alert in Pulse by Zaweba watches them for you and tells you when a sensor runs hot. It's switched on by default, so as long as Pulse is running in the tray, you're covered from the moment you install it.
How it decides
On the Alerts page the setting reads "a temperature reaches", followed by a value. The alert fires when a sensor stays past its threshold for 5 seconds. That short wait is deliberate. Temperatures flick up and down all the time, and an alert that went off on every brief blip would soon be ignored. Five seconds above the line means the heat is real.
Choosing the threshold
You have two choices. Leave the value at 0, and Pulse uses each sensor's own hot band. Or set a fixed number of degrees C, and every sensor is measured against that.
The default of 0 is the sensible one for most people. Pulse's hot bands come from the hardware's own limits where it can read them, such as the CPU's TjMax and an NVMe drive's own warning temperature. Where it can't, it uses sensible defaults for each kind of part, which you can see on the tiles of the Temperatures page. A GPU and a drive have very different safe ranges, and the hot band respects that.
A fixed number is simpler to reason about but treats every sensor the same. It can suit you if you only care about one kind of part and want a stricter line for it, but bear in mind it applies to everything Pulse reads.
Which sensors it covers
The alert can only watch sensors Pulse can read. GPU and NVMe drive temperatures work without administrator rights. CPU and motherboard sensors need the optional sensor helper, turned on with Sensor readings in Settings, plus the free, signed PawnIO driver. If you want the alert to catch a hot processor, switch the helper on.
What happens when it fires
Each alert fires once, then re-arms when things return to normal. So you get one notification for one hot spell, not a stream of them. It appears as a Windows notification from Pulse's tray icon and is added to the Alert log on the Alerts page with the date and time. Temperature alerts are highlighted as warnings in the log, so they stand out from the rest.
What to do next
When an alert arrives, open Pulse and go to the Live page to see which apps are busy right now. If the hot spell has passed by the time you look, the History page's temperature peaks list shows each peak with the three busiest apps in that minute.
One alert during a heavy game on a warm day isn't cause for concern. Regular alerts are. They usually point at blocked vents, dust, a fan that isn't keeping up, or one program that's working the PC harder than it should. The Fans group on the Temperatures page can help you tell those apart.
Leaving it on
There's little reason to switch this alert off. It costs almost nothing, it's quiet when things are fine, and it's one of the main reasons to keep Pulse by Zaweba in the tray rather than opening it only when something feels wrong.
