The spring season is in the full swing and flowers are blossoming everywhere. But soon the scorching summer season would follow and make everything very hot. While some people living in the northern US do enjoy the summers, southern regions of the US get extremely hot and it becomes impossible to survive without an air-conditioner. As you prepare your home or office for the summer heat, you should also clean the dust from your computer so that it does not get overheated. Very high working temperature or humidity can damage the components of your PC including the CPU. If you do not know whether your PC is working in hot conditions, then you can use the free Core Temp application for Windows that lets you monitor the temperature of your CPU.
The Core Temp application is freely available from the website of Alcpu Software. The download is available in installer format (which comes with bundled software) and also in portable application format. In the main window of the Core Temp, it displays the temperature (in degree Celsius) of all the cores (if you have multi-core CPU) of your processor along with the basic information like operating frequency, socket, model, core voltage and so on.
If you minimize the Core Temp window, then it disappears from the Windows taskbar and minimizes to the system tray. In the system tray it keeps showing the current temperature of your CPU cores. In the settings of the Core Temp, you can also make it display the operating frequency (speed) of the CPU or the CPU load.
Although all the modern CPU processors come with overheat protection (they shutdown if the core temperature crosses a critical limit), it is not wise to keep the CPU running in the vicinity of the critical temperature as it can reduce the processor life over time. The Core Temp application comes with customizable overheat of its own. You can choose Options → Overheat protection from the menubar to enable and customize it. In the overheat protection, you can choose the critical temperature and decide what to do if this temperature limit is reached (power off, hibernate or sleep Windows).
In other settings of the Core Temp application, you can choose to run it automatically at Windows startup, enable logging, display multi-core temperatures, notification area icon settings, taskbar icon settings and more.
Conclusion: Core Temp is a small application that can monitor and display your CPU core temperatures along with other vital information. It also comes with an overheat protection feature that quickly powers off your PC if the CPU temperature reaches dangerously high levels.
You can download Core Temp from http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/.