|
Most modern motherboards come with a variety of sensors for monitoring such things as temperature, fan speeds, and voltages. My new computer has an ASUS motherboard with just such items, and a software utility (ASUS PC Probe) for monitoring them. Lately, due to just a little paranoia and suspicion about a noise possibly being made by a fan, I decided to set the utility to start automatically with Windows and quietly monitor everything in the background, and sound an alarm if anything goes amiss.
Now, 99% of the time it's quite happy - but on more than one occasion it's gone a little haywire. Like reporting the fan suddenly jumping from around 2700 rpm, to -1700, or the core voltage, which normally sits at about 2V, going to 12. It usually only reports such crazy values for a minute or so before returning to normal, although the other day it was stringing a whole series of apparent malfunctions together, one after the other. And, strangely, nearly all the times it's happened it's done so while someone's been playing Dungeon Siege.
I'm pretty sure it's misreporting when it does this - it graphs each monitor in real time, and there's something that make me think something's not telling the truth. Like the line for the CPU fan going from a steady 2700 rpm, suddenly going vertically off the top of the scale to over 20,000. And if the voltage lines really were crisscrossing one another like a earthquake richter scale, I'd don't think the PC would be functioning for me to watch it.
Is it commonplace for these things to misreport occasionally? And how am I supposed to know if something is wrong if I can't take it seriously?
|
