SpeedFan is a system monitoring tool that can detect and display your PCs fan speeds, motherboard and hard drive temperature, system voltages, hard drive status and more. And it's able to control fan speeds according to the temperature of other components, helping you to reduce system noise.

Launching the program on our test PC, for instance, displayed a host of useful information: CPU type, the temperature of each core, the system temperature, the speeds of all four system fans, and voltages including Vcore, +12V and AVcc.

Click the Chart tab and you're able to plot graphs showing how these figures change over time, very useful if your PC is misbehaving and you think it might be overheating. Leave SpeedFan running in the background, run something that will exercise your system - a fast 3D game, say - then check the SpeedFan chart to find out exactly what's going on.

A S.M.A.R.T. tab is supposed to show you the status of your hard drives, assuming they support the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring system: you'll get to see details like the current drive temperature, spin-up time, read errors and so on. This didn't work for us as the program didn't even recognise our hard drives for some reason, but you may be more lucky.

And if you'd like to do more than just monitor what's happening, you may be able to set up SpeedFan to vary your fan speeds depending on what's happening elsewhere in the system, although again the success of this will depend on how well the program works with your individual hardware.

Recent changes include:

4.52
    - added full support for Fintek F71811U 
    - added full support for Nuvoton NCT6106D 
    - added full support for Nuvoton NCT6792D 
    - added full support for Fintek F71878A/F71868A 
    - added full support for ITE IT8783F 
    - added full support for Intel C610/X99 SMBus 
    - added full support for ITE IT8620E 
    - added support for Nuvoton NCT6683D 
    - fixed Fintek F71808A PWM MODE setting 
    - added PWM 4 ENABLE and PWM 5 ENABLE to advanced options for the ITE IT8620E to enable or disable PWM 4 and 5 writes 
    - smbus access is disabled for Sapphire PC-AM2RD790 
    - fixed fan speed readings on the NCT6791D 
    - SCSI Scan is automatically disabled if iastorA.sys driver is installed - use /DOSCSISCAN to force enable it 
    - fixed Fintek F71811U PWM TYPE advanced setting 
    - greatly improved RAM SPD decoding for SDRAM, DDR, DDR2, DDR2 FB-DIMM and DDR3 
    - improved identification of newer revisions of Microchip MCP9843 and MCP98243 
    - fixed STTS3000 and STTS2002 temperature reporting 
    - fixed old IT8705F identification 
    - events can now be triggered if something happens for, at least, up to 9999 times (it was 99) 
    - battery charge is now properly updated on the EXOTICS tab 
    - NCT6791D IO Space accessibility is now tested upon resume from suspend and fixed, if needed 
    - restored DIMM access on latest Intel chipsets 
    - added manifest to improve support up to Windows 10 
    - configuration dialog now always opens at the center of the main window