HWiNFO (32/64)

Free and very detailed. I think this program for expert or overclockers.

Used to be my go-to utility for some detailed system monitoring in the software itself, but mostly to reliably provide system monitoring variables to other software Rainmeter/Samurize/etc.

But, the developer decided to add a 12-hour limitation to the "Shared Memory Support"-feature which a lot of these latter programs rely on. The implementation and communication around this limitation was in my opinion handled very poorly, and helped killed off many good 3rd party solutions that relied on this feature to function.

Instead of rewriting a ton implementations to function with the new and poorly documented workaround method, I've gone with some of the other, open-source alternatives suggested here. Don't think I'll be looking back anytime soon.

portable and efficient

Closed-source blinking dashboard with concerning incentives to pay. I guess it sorts of appeal to tuning freaks, so if you love glowing mobos, neon’d chassis and rainbowing graphical cards, I guess this is the tool for you. Otherwise I suggest looking for open source alternatives that focus on the only thing this is actually good at: monitoring hardware.

This is a great tool! It allows you to access various useful data about your PC's performance and health.

One of my essential pieces of software.

Pros: exposes basically every hardware sensor you could ask for and then some, and can create system tray icons for any of them. Very customizable.

Cons: added a paywall for shared memory access, which is required to access any of that info through anything but HWInfo itself. Layouts are a pain to manage, and there's no easy way to save and swap between different layouts. Column system is clunky to put it nicely and the only filter options to reduce the hundreds of sensors and stats are to manually hide them one by one or toggle broad categories like temps and voltages, with a lot of stuff getting lumped into an 'other' category. Somewhat slow to launch. Lacks basic UI features like collapsible sections, which is especially annoying when my CPU alone has well over 100 reported sensors, most of which are unnecessary (I don't need to see usage, utility, residency, temps, clock ratios, clockspeeds, effective clockspeeds, vids, and wattages for all 16 logical cores).

Still a useful tool when you really need to see all the things, but the UI issues and the decision to paygate the feature that previously let you bypass the bad UI make it hard to recommend as a primary hw monitoring tool.