Sensor monitoring

Sensor monitoring gives you a live and historical view of your system's thermal, power, and performance metrics. Use it to identify 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 your hardware supports them:

CPU sensors

GPU sensors

Memory

Battery sensors (laptops)

Wi-Fi sensors

Real-time monitoring

The sensor grid shows live readings with sparkline charts that cover the last 30 seconds of activity. Readings update every half second. This gives 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 that shows recent history

Historical charts (Plus)

With Novabench Plus, Novabench logs sensor data automatically in the background and charts it over time. Historical charts let you track trends and identify gradual changes such as rising temperatures or declining battery health.

Time ranges

Chart features

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

Sensor data during tests

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

• Benchmarks: Novabench records sensor data alongside each test phase (CPU, GPU, Memory, Storage)
• Stress tests: continuous sensor capture with color-coded bands that show each component's run (Plus)
• Network tests: Novabench charts Wi-Fi signal strength, quality, and frequency during the test (Plus)
• AI tests: Novabench records temperature, power, and usage during each measurement, and uses the power data for the energy-efficiency figures (charts are 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 run with sensor logging enabled.

Enabling sensor logging

1. Open Novabench and go to Settings.
2. Make sure that 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. It records the same metrics for each GPU, plus memory usage, battery stats (on laptops), and Wi-Fi signal data. Novabench stores the data 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 show values in your preferred unit. You can change this in Novabench's settings.

Feature availability