HWiNFO Configuration Guide
To get the temperatures & GPU usage from your system, you have to configure the Rainmeter skin to get the correct sensors/data from HWiNFO.
HWiNFO is a very robust and extensive system monitoring application for Windows, which is pretty lightweight and thus perfectly suited for monitoring your temperature.
You can download it by clicking here: https://www.hwinfo.com/download/
After installing, you should either have the main window open or you need to start the application manually.
The welcome window of HWiNFO should appear and in there you need to open the settings by clicking on Settings button. You can also check Sensors-only if you don't want to open the summary window when starting this application.
After clicking Settings the following window should pop up:
Above you'll see a few options, which Shared Memory Support (red) is the only one required here as it's needed to communicate with Rainmeter. The other ones are recommended options (yellow) if you intend to use it with Rainmeter, since those allow the program to start with Windows and keep it minimized all the time.
Now go back to your desktop and open the settings skin by right-clicking on the SysDash skin and then pressing on Open Settings.
A settings skin should appear on the desktop and then click on HWiNFO on the left and a new window should appear.
Then you want to click on HWiNFO Shared Memory Viewer which will open a new program like this:
In here you can find all sensors/values HWiNFO can read and output to Rainmeter, but for this skin we'll use only the values from the Temperature type.
Now you only have to search for the correct entry for the temperature, which is often called CPU Package for the processor and GPU Temperature/GPU Thermal Diode for the graphics card. When you found the correct entry in the list, click on the entry and it will fill out some data in the grey boxes down below.
For the GPU Usage, you need to search for the GPU D3D Usage as this is the correct value reported by Windows and the graphics driver.
INFO: Some processors with integrated graphic chips might not show the GPU as an seperate entry. In that case just ignore the GPU values and remove the GPU skin from your desktop.
It should look like this:
Now there are four different values which are important:
- Sensor ID
- Sensor Instance
- Entry ID
- Entry Type (not needed, only to verify if you got the temperature sensor)
Those values correspond to the fields in the settings skin and they need to be filled in to get the right data to Rainmeter. As an example this would be the values accordingly to the image above:
- CPU Sensor ID: 0xf0002a00
- CPU Sensor Instance: 0x0
- CPU Entry ID: 0x1000004
You can enter those values by clicking on the dark-grey field you want to change and it should pop-up a text field where you can enter the value. After entering the value, press ENTER to confirm it.
If you entered all values correctly, it should update the skin automatically and you should have the temperature and device name showing.
INFO:
For some processors (e.g Ryzen & Threadripper) you need to set an offset since the sensor outputs the incorrect value. You can find the offset values for Ryzen/Threadripper here: https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-ryzen-7-2700x-review,7.html
After you're done, you can close the HWiNFO Shared Memory Viewer as it's no longer needed anymore for the program to run correctly.
Have fun!