NVIDIA System Monitor (cont’d)
Back at the desktop you can see that our data have slightly changed in style and are now viewable in a normal Windows environment. They are useful to see but not much to look at quite yet.
You can merge them all together into a more compact display type and the application sorts them based on the data they are reporting. There are four temperatures being shown in the left column while there are two usage percentages shown further to the right. Only a single frequency and current are being monitored actively so they also have their own columns.
You can also choose to view the results over time in the form of a line graph. These are nice to see, but they are small enough that the detail each graph provides is pretty minimal. Is knowing that your 12VA current is between 0 and 100 amps that helpful? Maybe not, but seeing trends over time can help with trouble shooting or diagnosing any problems in your system.
The monitoring applications options allow you to change the update frequency as well as the temperature scale and some other casual options.
You can even log the results of the monitoring software if you want more detail that the on-screen information provides.
I do have a couple of issues with the monitoring tool though, the first of which involves application switching.
As you can see in this Alt-Tab window, the OS sees each of these displays as its own Window, making the frequent Alt-Tab-ers out there somewhat annoyed.
Also while the CPU usage seemed pretty low, a hefty 100MB of system memory was being used by the application.
Despite those two minor issues, the monitoring application is surprisingly easy to use and navigate and provides a lot of information in a somewhat well displayed fashion. I can’t help but think some designers out there could show NVIDIA’s development team a better way to do it, but I haven’t come up with anything yet either.
