Which Sensor monitors my CPU?

Please bear with me on this one folks.

I simply am asking which sensor is probably/likely accurate

Here is the scenario:100% Full Load Using SPYBOT for about 8 minutes.

"AMD K8 Sensor" is 66C
"IT8712F-1" is 54C

Which Sensor is accurate? Which one should I be using?

I really do appreciate your help thus far and in the future.

Hey, axelrose,

Welcome to our forums.

Luckily, our community is knowledgeable and friendly so we are going to help you out and bear with your question. It is a dilemma that arises quite often and should be clarificated but people usually don't bother. So personally I am happy that you asked. Accurate voltage and temperature measuring is one of my favorite topics.

First, let me answer your question in short then I'll introduce some of the new concepts and finish my post advocating two of the articles I have written on this topic. They are very comprehensive, informative, and cover everything that's related to temperature measurements. I can guarantee that reading those the topic of accurate voltage and temperature measuring becomes demystified.

AMD K8 Sensor - it is probably the on-die thermal diode that's on the chip. But you cannot be sure of this.

IT8712F-1 - it is the Super I/O chip that's on your motherboard and it interpretes the read values by the sensors on your motherboard. Its placement is on a significant distance and not incorporated so it makes sense that its value is one notch lower. You cannot trust this either.



Both of these are accurate up to a certain degree. They actually read and interprete the feedback and then report them in an understandable way to you. However, neither of these should you completely trust, reason for that is simply because sensors can be way off, even though, the temperatures are read accurately then the feedback can be interpreted using an incorrect mathematic equation, or the update frequency on which time interval these read temperatures are refreshed (re-read, re-interpreted, and reported again) might be too high and thus the sensor is not that much sensitive. In the next paragraph I'm going to suggest 2 articles, one of those clearly explains what to do to achieve a reliable temperatures. Check them out!

Read the following articles to understand what these mean such as Super I/O chip and to understand how all of these work altogether like the multiple temps and which one to trust, which are which, and so forth: Measuring Temperatures with Thermal Probes and External Sensors and An Introduction to Accurate Voltage Measurements (despite the title it is very similar to the temperature measurements - on a conceptual level of methdology and inner-workings).

Once you're done with those, your awareness is raised, and should you need further clarifications, don't hesitate to ask us.

PS: I'm a hurry and can't explain it more throurougly...

Bump...

Madhyena gave a pretty good answer.

Trust the AMD one if you will. Find out the max on-die temperature and as long as you are about 30c lower than that, you should be okay.

The AMD one measures as high as 66C, my max on die temp from AMD's website says 65C.

That cannot be good.
Unless of course the Wrong sensor is being used???