Inspect System

Inspect System is the part of Novabench that describes the machine rather than scoring it. Where the Test tab produces benchmark numbers, Inspect System answers different questions. It covers what the hardware actually is, what is installed on it, how it behaves over time, and what crashes.

Novabench reads everything on this tab locally. Nothing here requires an account or a network connection. Some sections need Novabench Plus or Pro. A few need the background service to run before they have any history to show.

The section rail

Open Inspect System from the tab bar. A rail down the left side of the tab switches between sections.

Section	What it shows	Availability
Overview	Live previews plus the full system inventory	All platforms
Software	Every installed application, grouped by publisher and source	All platforms
Drivers	Kernel and system drivers with status and start type	Windows
Battery Health	Capacity and charge history	Devices with a battery
Sensor History	Temperature, power, and load over time	All platforms
Test Trends	Benchmark and network results charted over time	All platforms
Boot Times	Startup, resume, shutdown, and sleep history	Windows and Linux
Crash Reports	Blue screens, app crashes, and hangs with cause attribution	Windows

Novabench hides sections that do not apply, rather than disabling them. A desktop with no battery has no Battery Health entry. Drivers and Crash Reports appear only on Windows, while Boot Times currently appears on Windows and Linux.

The overview screen

The overview is a two-column layout. On the left are three preview cards that summarize the historical sections. On the right is the system inventory.

Each preview card shows a compact chart of the past week and links to its full section:

Sensor History previews CPU and GPU temperature and load
Battery Health previews capacity and charge level
Test Result Trends previews performance and network results

A preview with no data explains why instead of rendering an empty chart. "No sensor history in the past week" means logging did not run long enough. The Battery Health card offers a Configure logging link when logging is off entirely.

How the data is collected

Inspect System draws on three sources. Knowing which is which explains why some sections populate instantly and others fill in over days.

Live reads. Novabench collects the inventory, software list, and driver list on demand when you open the section. They reflect the machine as it is right now. Some inventory fields come from the elevated Novabench service, which is why a stopped service produces gaps rather than errors.

Logged history. Novabench builds Sensor History, Battery Health, and the battery and sensor previews from snapshots the background service writes over time. Nothing appears until logging runs for a while. See sensor monitoring for how to turn logging on and what gets recorded.

Stored results and events. Test Trends reads your local result database, so it fills in as you run benchmarks. Boot Times reads power transition records from Windows or Linux and keeps a local history. Crash Reports reads Windows error reporting records and any crash dumps that were saved at the time of the crash.

Portable mode

Portable mode has no background service, so the sections that depend on logged history stay empty. Live reads still work.

What each plan unlocks

Most live inventory and list views are free. Historical analysis and detailed diagnostics require Plus or Pro as shown below.

Capability	Free	Plus	Pro
System inventory: hardware, OS, firmware, network, battery, virtualization	Yes	Yes	Yes
Installed software and driver lists	Yes	Yes	Yes
Crash list	Yes	Yes	Yes
Boot Times history and basic detail	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sensor and battery history	—	Yes	Yes
Test result trends	—	Yes	Yes
Boot Times trends and explanations		Yes	Yes
OS update status	—	—	Yes
Crash detail, call stacks, and dump analysis	—	Yes	Yes
Security posture	—	—	Yes
Warranty and coverage	—	—	Yes
Boot Times CSV export			Yes
CSV export from any list	—	—	Yes

Reading the tab honestly

The values Unknown, Disabled, and Not supported have different meanings. Unknown means that Novabench could not determine the value on this machine.

Confidence labels on battery health estimates and crash attribution show the certainty of each result.