How to monitor pc with free software

Knowing the different ways to monitor PC is not something only designed for "geeks" and gamers, since it could depend on its proper functioning. That is why in this article we are going to see the different forms and programs that there are to know everything about our equipment, something basic that more and more manufacturers contribute their own utilities to make life easier for us.

Index of contents

What is PC monitoring useful for?

Like any electronic component, a computer always needs gradual maintenance to keep it in optimum condition. And it's not just about checking the inside of our chassis and cleaning it from time to time, a practice that many don't even do. In addition to this, we must check the temperatures, the space occupied on our hard drives or even the activity of our CPU, RAM and network.

And you will ask yourself, why do I want to know these parameters? Well, imagine that your computer suddenly becomes slower, or the system starts giving you warnings of little disk space. This will be at best, because in others, we will directly have gradual restarts or a nice virus that we didn't even think was inside the system. Reviewing these parameters we will be able to detect problems such as the following:

• CPU and RAM activity: this way we detect if there are programs running in the background consuming resources without us noticing. Network activity: many free programs installing secondary ones without us realizing that you continually consume resources such as network resources. If we are not downloading anything and we see that the computer makes heavy use of the network, it will be a serious reason for alert. Storage and hard drives: this is a problem, prevent the drive from filling up and we can properly control our data. Battery, lighting, display configuration, etc: many of the programs provided by the board manufacturers allow us to fully manage the devices that make up our computer, although of course, they are not 100% generic.

Windows tools

If we want an application that is fully compatible with our hardware, whatever its brand and that of our equipment, then the best we have is what the Windows operating system (or any other) gives us.

In the Task Manager we have more and more monitoring options: CPU, RAM, services, programs, network, and recently the activity of the graphics card has been incorporated. There really aren't much more complete programs than this one, and fully integrated into the system.

And we can go a little further and access the Resource Monitor, whose link is in the "performance" section to see in more detail the activity of the CPU cores and threads

The only downside we have with this program is that it is not as pretty and eye-catching as the ones that manufacturers have. In addition, we no longer have the possibility of placing gadgets on the screen, something that many users seek to have a striking desktop and gaming.

Plate Makers Tools

In second position we have all the programs available from hardware manufacturers. Any of them offers us programs with which we can monitor PC in great detail and, what is better, interact with it.

These manufacturers are Asus, MSI, Gigabyte / AORUS ASRock, AMD and Intel. Above we see for example the Dragon Center solution from MSI or Asus Armory for your laptops or desktops, or the application to control the ASRock motherboard. All of them will be found in the support section of the hardware in question, completely free.

The problem of these applications is evident, that they are only 100% compatible for the hardware of that brand. There is little point in installing Dragon Center for example on a Dell laptop, nor the ASRock app on an Asus board. In any case, almost all users have hardware from these brands, so the least we can do is take advantage of the services and management they give us for their hardware.

Some of them even allow us to overclock the GPU like Evga Precision X1, MSI Afterburner and others, although these can be included within the free generic ones due to their versatility.

Free software to monitor PC

And finally we have the full range of solutions that the Internet can provide us, and it is not always easy to find the best in each case, or something that meets our aesthetic tastes.

Rainmeter: to fill the desktop with gadgets

There are still many users who miss a way to visualize the hardware through gadgets placed on their desktop as Windows Vista introduced in their day.

Rainmeter is undoubtedly the best application for this, since it is free and all the Skings it offers are also free, having all tastes and designs on pages such as DeviantArt or VisualSkings. What's more, the most boring and handymen can create their own skings from those already created since the code of the same can be accessed from the program.

HWiNFO: to monitor temperatures and much more

This program is much more than a temperature monitor, since it is practically capable of reading all the sensors installed on our computer. We are talking about CPU, GPU, VRM, Chispet, HDD temperatures, and also voltages, frequency, RAM, etc.

Its appearance is not the friendliest or most aesthetic of all, but the information it gives is not comparable to any other PC monitoring program.

EVGA Precision X1 or AMD WattMan: GPU overclocking

For users who are looking for the possibility of monitoring the state of the CPU, as well as being able to overclock it, two mandatory applications are going to be, on the one hand EVGA Precision X1 for GPUs from Nvidia and AMD WattMan for GPUs from AMD.

There are no better GPU compatibility apps than these in their respective domains. EVGA offers us a complete monitoring of frequency, energy, temperature and voltage of the Nvidia, with all these options unlocked to be able to modify them to our liking. Likewise, AMD WattMan is even more detailed in this regard, and best of all, it is included in the AMD Adrenalin drivers of the manufacturer's own cards.

To overclocking or undervolting these GPUs are the easiest and most attractive way, and we can also complement them with GPU-Z and Furmark to monitor the response during this practice.

In the case of Asus we have quite similar software called Asus GPU Tweak II that also serves for overclocking the GPU. And in the case of Gigabyte we also find AORUS Engine. Although it is not as widely used as those discussed.

MSI Afterburner: FPS and overclocking

MSI is another legendary program with a long history for gaming users who want to overclock the GPU. Although for us, its most important quality is to monitor the FPS of the games and the load on the hardware, since it offers much more compatibility than Fraps, for example. However, in terms of overclocking in many cases it does not allow us to modify the voltage, something that is possible with EVGA.

It includes the Rivatuner utility, which is offers all this versatility in reading parameters of the game and our hardware. We can create a complete Statistics Log while we are playing. The truth is that Afterburner has improved a lot in general with the new version 4.6.1 giving a complete turn to its aesthetics and giving us more functions that closely resemble EVGA Precision.

Intel XTU and AMD Ryzen Master: CPU monitoring and undervolting

We can not forget about the monitoring of our CPU, which although it is true we can do perfectly with HWiNFO, this program does not give the possibility of overclocking or undervolting.

So for that we have the programs of each of the main manufacturers, that is, Intel and AMD. On the one hand, the Intel Extreme Utility application, in addition to providing us with a complete performance monitor for our Intel CPU, also allows us to touch many parameters related to the CPU power that is fabled for undevolting on laptops. And the same can be said of the Ryzen Master utility, renewed after these new Ryzen 3000 with many more management options, monitoring and overclocking practices.

BatteryMon: advanced battery monitoring

We were still missing something to monitor the PC battery, and what better application than BatteryMon. Its interface is certainly not a portent, but it gives us more information than any other in terms of consumption, capacity, life and other parameters of the laptop battery.

It does not have calibration options, but it is a good way to compare the time estimated by Windows for autonomy and that offered by this application. We can integrate comparative graphs to take into account all possible consumption scenarios and thus control how far we can go.

Other free apps

Along with these that we consider to be the main ones for each discipline, we have a whole host of other applications on the Internet that perform very similar functions, especially in the area of ​​temperature monitoring and hardware identification of our equipment.

Among them we can mention: HWMonitor, Open Hardware Monitor, BatteryCare, CrystalDiskInfo, Everest, Aida (for a fee), Speccy, etc. We think that the most important are the ones mentioned, and we do not intend to make a macro article with everything on the Internet, which is a lot, although very repetitive.

What if in addition to monitoring PC we test it

And we can not say goodbye to this article on PC monitoring without encouraging you to also perform different performance tests on your hardware. This is the most complete way to see if our team is performing properly and it gives us the numbers that we expect, since there are many benchmarks that have their own rankings to buy from other similar teams. Among them we can highlight:

• 3DMark: performance test and FPS for the VRMark GPU: the same as 3DMark Aida64: monitoring, hardware listing, stress test and benchmark to RAM Cinebench: benchmark to CPU PCMark: overall performance benchmark Furmark: stress test for GPU Prime95: CPU stress test WPrime: CPU processing time Atto Benchmark: Hard Disk performance CristalDiskMark: Hard disk performance

We recommend these tutorials to continue testing your equipment

What way will you use to monitor PC? If you know more and better programs than these that we have commented, write us in the comment box.