Finding out CPU temperatures

Last week, I noticed that my computer was becoming really sluggish and the fans, extremely noisy. Seeing as to how I had an inkling that this was due to my CPU heating up or rather, not being cooled enough, and the fact that Windows wasn't telling me what the temperature was, I was in the hunt for a utility to report CPU temperatures in real time. I could, of course, check it via my BIOS. But I wanted a utility to be able to run under load.

First off, I checked one of my favourite utilities, HWInfo, a freeware diagnostic utility. While it did tell me that one of the cores in my CPU was always being throttled, there was no temperature report forthcoming. Subsequently, turning to Google, I tested a number of utilities including "Real Temp" and "Core Temp". None of them supported my Pentium D 925 CPU. Asking around on IRC, somebody recommended HWMonitor as being the most reliable around, and he/she was right! It reported the lot and I was able to confirm that temperatures were skyrocketing (almost 70C :/).

So this is a 'Thank you' post and an attempt to boost HWMonitor up Google's rankings.

For the curious, I had to clean my heatsink and reapply thermal paste to bring temperatures back down to a more sedate 48C. But for one of the screws on the heatsink malfunctioning, I could have brought it down to 39C on idle :/ Need to fix that one of these days.