Helps Your PC Be Cool
Image: Partial Screenshot – Courtesy Alfredo Milani Comparetti
SpeedFan is a freeware program that monitors fan speeds, temperatures and voltages in computers with hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan supports EIDE, SATA and SCSI drives. SpeedFan can even change the FSB on some motherboards (but this should be considered a bonus feature).
At the lowest level, SpeedFan is an hardware monitor software that can access digital temperature sensors, but its main feature is that it can change fan speeds (depending on the capabilities of your sensor chip and your hardware) according to the temperatures inside your PC, thus reducing noise.
SpeedFan can even access S.M.A.R.T. info for those * disks that support this feature and show * disk temperatures too, if supported.
This program is aimed at the power computer user. For the ones that know what they’re doing. But it could prove very useful to the serious user who wants to prolong his or her compuer’s life while keeping its noise level (due to fan speed) to a minimum.
(The author notes: “I’ve known of no real problem caused by SpeedFan, but may be it’s due to the fact that once it made the PC explode and the user disappeared in the blast, thus being unable to report 
Anyway: SpeedFan can be extremely useful, but you should first watch its behavior before setting and forgetting it.”)
First of all, you have to identify which temperature sensor is which. SpeedFan strictly adheres to available datasheets for each sensor chip. Please remember that hardware monitors are chips that do have some pins (small connectors) which should be connected to some additional hardware (temperature probes, thermistors or thermocouples) in order to be able to read temperatures. Only a few hardware monitor chips do label their connectors with “CPU”, “System” and the like. Most of them use labels like “Temp1″, “Local” or “Remote”.
Developed by Alfredo Milani Comparetti, an engineer from Italy
