The complete guide to monitor CPU and system temperatures in iCUE

When you build your system, you carefully plan how it will look, where the fans will go, and how you will keep your precious CPU and graphics card cool for maximum performance. Once everything is built and Windows is installed, you should also monitor your system's temperatures. Modern systems include a high number of sensors to do just that. CORSAIR iCUE software is here to help you access the data from these sensors.

Let's take a closer look at what CORSAIR iCUE has to offer for monitoring system metrics.

This is the screen you are greeted with after installing iCUE. It will look a bit different to yours, as the right portion is dependent on which iCUE enabled products you have. The great news is that the monitoring features are available to you, even if you do not have any iCUE enabled products. So, if you just want to check out how the temperatures of your CPU, GPU, and Motherboard are doing, you will find that information too.

The home screen is divided into four sections. You have the menu bar (1) at the top, the software profiles (2) on the left, followed by the Murals and Sensors quick access section (3), and then all of your connected iCUE compatible devices on the right (4).

We will concentrate on the Sensors (3) portion of the home screen. Here you will find pre-selected metrics that you can modify to show sensors that matter to you.

The Sensors section on the home screen has a selection of sensors showing as soon as you open CORSAIR iCUE for the first time. The “+” symbol lets you add or remove sensors.

A new window will appear where you can select the sensors that are most relevant to you. It makes sense to have the temperatures of the CPU Package and GPU displayed there, so we recommend selecting these. When you are using an iCUE LINK H150i RGB AIO Liquid CPU Cooler for example, you can also add the temperature of the cooling liquid to quickly see if all is performing like it should. But it does not stop there. You can also add the battery status of wireless peripherals like the CORSAIR DARKSTAR WIRELESS RGB MMO Gaming Mouse. (You can also put the battery level indicator into the notifications area of your taskbar, too. Find this option in the Device Settings menu of the product in question).

Not happy with how the sensors are arranged? You can easily change the order in which the sensors are displayed simply by dragging and dropping them to your liking.

When you hover over a sensor, three dots appear in the upper right corner of the sensor. Click on these dots to edit the sensor. Aside of the feature to hide the graph portion of the sensor and to remove it entirely, you will also find the option to rename the sensor.

Renaming sensors is useful because sometimes the names the system reports to iCUE are not clear enough to indicate what you are looking at. After you click on Rename, a window will appear allowing you to enter a unique name and then save it.

Here an example of what a selection of renamed sensors and a battery status could look like. It provides at-a-glance information about the CPU load, the CPU temperature, the GPU load, GPU temperatures, and the battery status of a mouse.

Space on the home screen is limited, so we have implemented another view within iCUE called Dashboard. Here you can display many sensors so that you can quickly check the status of several metrics at the same time. To view the Dashboard, simply click on the menu item and it opens right up. A selection of sensors should already be visible depending on your system.

To add or remove sensors, click the icon in the top right of the Dashboard.

A new window will appear that lets you select / unselect the sensors that should appear.

Sensors are grouped by the device they are associated with. You can drag and drop the groups to place them in the order you prefer.

If you are only interested in a certain sensor of a device, you can also drag and drop that specific sensor out of the group and make it a sensor that is displayed on its own.

On the top right of each group, you will see three dots that let you resize the group window, hide the graphs to only show the actual value of the sensor, or remove the group entirely.

When hovering your cursor over any sensor, three dots will appear that let you add / remove the sensor from the iCUE Home Screen, rename the sensor, or remove it from the group.

iCUE has a built-in feature to log sensor data to a CSV file for further analysis. To access the logging feature, open the iCUE Settings in the top right corner of the iCUE window.

A new window will appear with the iCUE settings. Click Sensor Logging. This will display a list of sensors available for logging. Check the ones you are interested in. To make it easier to navigate through the sensors, you can select a group. This will limit the displayed sensors to those associated with that group.

You can specify the location where the file will be stored, the logging interval in seconds, and a logging duration limit in minutes. Note that if you start logging without a duration limit, iCUE will continuously write to the selected drive, even if it is minimized. Therefore, it is recommended to limit the log duration.

Above is an example of what a log file will look like. The CSV file can be imported into a spreadsheet application of your choice for analysis.

With the above knowledge of how to monitor sensors and log the data when needed, you are now set to make sure your system is always running at its best.