Just recently, we learned that NVIDIA’s RTX 50 series does indeed feature a hotspot sensor. This sensor is used to measure the highest temperature on theGPUdie, rather than the average temperature. This is a useful measurement because it helps identify poor contact when reassembling a heatsink, for example. While until now this sensor could only be read using NVIDIA’s proprietary software, we’ve learned that HWMonitor now makes this reading possible!
HWMonitor now allows you to read the hotspot sensor on RTX 50 cards!
This is possible thanks to version 1.65 of the software!
Until now, software that accessed the sensor would display completely absurd values—showing 255°C. Later, the developer behind CPU-Z revealed that the value was no longer available viathe publicAPI, a claim that seemed to be confirmed by Paulo Gomes, who was monitoring this value using MODS, aninternalNVIDIAtoolused for graphics card diagnostics. In fact, he recorded a hotspot temperature of 107°C, while the average temperature was only 68°C.
In short, this is where HWMonitor stands out from competing software, as version 1.65 of the program is able to report the hotspot sensor values for the RTX 50 series.
A version that has already been tested:
This version has been tested, and we’ve received initial feedback from @madness727 on X. He monitored his RTX 5090 Frostbite (Inno3D), which is water-cooled and has also undergone a shunt mod. At the outlet, the card draws 900W, and HWMonitor records a hotspot temperature of 67.8°C. The user notes that this is a 17°C difference from the card’s average temperature, which was 51.1°C after one minute of running 3DMark 11.
It’s unclear how they did it:
For now, we don’t know how the software developers managed to access this sensor; they haven’t disclosed the method. However, this shows that it is indeed possible, and we hope this feature will be implemented in other software such as AIDA64, HWiNFO64, or GPU-Z.
Check out version 1.65 of HWMonitor here!
