# HWiNFO HWiNFO is a hardware information and sensor monitoring tool for Windows, made by Martin Malík (REALiX). It reads every sensor your machine exposes and presents them all in one list: temperatures, voltages, clocks, fan speeds, power draw, utilization, per-core and per-rail, for CPU, GPU, motherboard, memory, drives, and network adapters. It is free for personal and non-commercial use. HWiNFO Pro exists for commercial environments (around $29), and mainly adds remote monitoring and extended logging. For a home machine, the free version is the full product. ## What makes it the reference Plenty of tools show a temperature. What sets HWiNFO apart is that it is usually **right**, and that it names things precisely. Where a generic monitor shows one "CPU temperature", HWiNFO shows CPU package, CPU die average, per-core temperatures, and the distinct sensor the motherboard reports on the socket, then tells you which is which. When you are chasing a thermal problem, that difference is the whole investigation. The rest of what you get: - **Complete sensor coverage**, updated aggressively as new hardware ships - **Logging to CSV**, so you can capture hours of data and open it in a spreadsheet afterwards. This is how you catch a fault that happens once every forty minutes - **Configurable alerts** on any sensor, with actions - **Shared memory interface**: other tools read HWiNFO's sensor data instead of polling the hardware themselves. This is how on-screen displays like RTSS and MSI Afterburner show accurate values during a game - **Detailed system reports** you can export, which are genuinely useful in a support ticket or an RMA request - **Minimum, maximum, and average** columns per sensor, retained across the session ## Notes from using it Run it in sensors-only mode. The full system summary window is interesting once; the sensors panel is what you keep open. Then hide what you do not need. HWiNFO's default view lists several hundred rows, which is where most people close it and go back to a prettier tool. Right-click, hide the irrelevant ones, and you get a tight dashboard of the twenty values that matter for your machine. The polling interval is a real tradeoff. Faster polling catches short spikes, but on some motherboards it also fights other software over the same sensor bus. Two seconds is a sane default. If you see erratic readings, slow it down before blaming the hardware. The logging feature is the underrated part. "It crashes sometimes" is not diagnosable. A CSV showing that the crash always follows a 12V rail dip is. ## My take HWiNFO is the measurement layer of the whole PC toolkit, and it is the tool I install first on any machine I intend to tune. [[Fan Control]] decides what to do, [[OCBase (OCCT)]] and [[FurMark]] create the conditions, and HWiNFO tells you the truth about what happened. Its interface is dense, dated, and completely unapologetic about it. That is fine. It is an instrument, not a dashboard, and I would rather have an accurate ugly number than a pretty wrong one. ## References - Official website: https://www.hwinfo.com/ - Download: https://www.hwinfo.com/download/ - Licensing: https://www.hwinfo.com/licenses/ - Forum (where hardware support requests get handled): https://www.hwinfo.com/forum/ ## Related - [[GPU-Z]]: the same idea, narrowed to the graphics card - [[Fan Control]]: acts on the temperatures HWiNFO reports - [[OCBase (OCCT)]] · [[FurMark]]: generate the load worth measuring - [[Winget]]: how I install it