When you first buy your desktop computer it already comes with good quality thermal paste properly applied to the heatsink. But after a year of regular use, you should re-apply thermal paste so that your desktop computer keeps cooling down the CPU properly. This is more important for the gaming computers as they stress the processors more. But after you have cleaned and applied new layer the thermal paste to the heatsink, you should monitor how your CPU is performing. For monitoring the CPU performance, a tool for Windows called CPUMon can be used.
CPUMon is a very small and simple tool for monitoring the CPU performance on your Windows computer. It displays two things in a chart – the CPU performance and the memory usage. The chart is realtime and keeps changing with time. In addition to the chart, it also shows the percentage of the load on the CPU and the current clock frequency for the CPU.
The CPUMon chart is transparent and can be dragged anywhere on the desktop screen. For moving this small window, you have to click on the left-top corner of its window before dragging it around. We can change its transparency level and the background color from the settings.
In the settings we can make it always run automatically with Windows so that it is shown on the desktop screen as soon as you start your PC. We can toggle the display of the memory usage on or off. Instead of the used memory, we can choose to display the available free memory. We can choose to display virtual or the real physical memory. We can also choose whether to show the memory usage in terms of percentage or gigabytes. We can also change the colors used to draw the chart as well as the window size of the CPUMon window.
You can download CPUMon from https://www.den4b.com/products/cpumon.