For the average desktop or laptop user, tracking CPU and GPU health is not something many people look at. Most of us rely on our machine to properly cool and take care of itself through dynamic fan speeds, unloading and other similar technologies.
However, you will be surprised at how quickly you can take a look at your equipment’s temperature and utilization rates, which will show the efficiency of your system. To share a personal story, I recently learned that the GPU on one of my desktops was running at nearly 80 ° C while playing – a temperature that would eventually hurt over a long period of time. Using Vsync to limit the frame rate gave a quick fix and my GPU got cool again.
There are many different types of software that you can use to monitor your CPU or GPU, but who wants to constantly check a separate window or allocate a lot of monitor space for a bulky widget containing these statistics?
If you’re a Windows user, there is a solution: the taskbar. The Windows taskbar has space for icons that can change dynamically, making it the perfect place to view important numbers under the hood of your system. This can be done using MSI Afterburner
Download MSI Afterburner
MSI Afterburner is the best Windows software when it comes to overclocking your graphics card It allows you to fine-tune the operation of the graphics card and fans and works with all brands of graphics cards.
However, overclocking can be intimidating and dangerous, and that’s not what this article is about. Rather than fiddling with hardware and risk voiding your warranty, we’ll just use MSI Afterburner as a way to display certain system statistics in the notification area.
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The MSI Afterburner download is just over 40MB and is compressed into a ZIP archive. The archive will contain a binary installation file that will allow you to install the application on your system.
After launching the app after successful installation, you will encounter a user interface that seems fresh from the early 2000s. This is a bar that shows your voltage, temperature, GPU clock speed, and more. From here, click on the gear icon to access MSI Afterburner settings.
Here, we’ll start working with MSI Afterburner to get visual hardware stats in the taskbar.
Monitor CPU or GPU with MSI Afterburner
In the window that opens immediately after accessing MSI Afterburner settings, there are two important options that need to be enabled.
Below the name of your GPU, you will see checkboxes allowing MSI Afterburner to run with Windows and minimized. If you want to be able to automatically monitor your CPU or GPU on every reboot, make sure they are ticked.
Then go to the “Monitoring” tab in the settings window. There are several settings here that you want to change and experiment with.
Under the heading Active Hardware Monitoring Graphs, you will see a long scrolling list of graphs supported by MSI Afterburner These include, but are not limited to, your GPU temperature, usage, core frequency, memory frequency, power, and fan speed. There are also similar options for your processor.
Since you can enable several such charts at the same time, all settings under this heading are unique to the currently selected chart. That being said, you will first need to click on the graph that you want to display in the taskbar.
When it is highlighted, check the Show in icon on taskbar box. You can display the icon as text or a bar graph, but I highly recommend using text – with a bar graph, the data becomes rather fuzzy.
You can further change the color of the text by clicking on the red square, and you can set up an alert when the graph value is outside a certain range. The latter is great for alerting you when your graphics card might be preparing to overheat.
Repeat this step for each graph you want to track and you should start seeing these icons in the taskbar.
If you don’t see the expected icons, they might be hidden as an inactive icon in the taskbar. To fix this, you can right-click on the taskbar, select taskbar settings, scroll down and click Choose which icons will appear on the taskbar, and customize each of your icons to always appear.
MSI Afterburner itself will also have a taskbar icon (which looks like an airplane). If you are not interested in displaying the visual toolbar, you can reduce the number of icons on the taskbar by going back to Preferences, going to the User Interface tab and checking the Icon mode on the taskbar box. This will not merge all your graphics into one, as the text suggests, but will simply remove the airplane icon.
This is it! Likewise, if you’ve enabled the ability to run MSI Afterburner with Windows, you’ll never have to jump over hoops again to find out what your GPU temperature, CPU load, and many other values ??are. A quick glance at the taskbar is enough.
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