Sensor monitoring

Sensor monitoring gives you a live and historical view of your system's thermal, power, and performance metrics. Use it to spot overheating, track long-term trends, and understand how your hardware behaves under different workloads.

What sensors are tracked

Novabench monitors the following sensor categories when supported by your hardware:

CPU sensors

GPU sensors

Memory

Battery sensors (laptops)

Wi-Fi sensors

Real-time monitoring

The sensor grid displays live readings with sparkline charts that show the last 30 seconds of activity. Readings update every half second, giving you an immediate picture of how your system responds to load changes.

Each sensor row shows:

• The current value (temperature, power, usage, or clock speed)
• A color-coded sparkline showing recent history

Historical charts (Plus)

With Novabench Plus, sensor data is logged automatically in the background and charted over time. Historical charts let you track trends and spot gradual changes like rising temperatures or declining battery health.

Time ranges

Chart features

• Interactive tooltips showing exact values and timestamps
• Statistics summary below each chart: minimum, maximum, average, and 90th percentile values
• Temperature trend line showing whether temps are stable, rising, or falling over the selected period

Sensor data during tests

Novabench captures sensor data while running benchmarks and stress tests. This gives you context for your scores: you can see whether your CPU throttled during the benchmark, how hot the GPU got under load, or whether power delivery was stable.

• Benchmarks: sensor data is recorded alongside each test phase (CPU, GPU, Memory, Storage)
• Stress tests: continuous sensor capture with color-coded bands showing each component's run (Plus)
• Network tests: Wi-Fi signal strength, quality, and frequency are charted during the test (Plus)

For details on reading sensor data during stress tests, see stress test.

Background sensor logging

To collect historical data, the Novabench background service must be running with sensor logging enabled.

Enabling sensor logging

1. Open Novabench and go to Settings.
2. Ensure the background service is running. On Windows, starting the service requires administrator privileges.
3. Toggle Sensor logging on. This records a sensor snapshot every two minutes.

What gets logged

When sensor logging is active, Novabench records CPU temperature, power, usage, and clock speed, along with the same metrics for each GPU, memory usage, battery stats (on laptops), and Wi-Fi signal data. The data is stored locally on your machine.

Temperature unit preference

Novabench follows your configured temperature unit (Celsius or Fahrenheit) throughout the application. All sensor grids, charts, and tooltips display values in your preferred unit. You can change this in Novabench's settings.

Feature availability