I think old Motherboards/CPU/GPU did not have a Sensor for read Temperature.

On my Athlon Systems there was PC Probe on the Driver CD.

But on my older Systems Pentium 1 / Pentium 3 there is no Way to check Temperatures.

The first Motherboard i have that was able to read Temperature was Abit KT7

The first GPU i own with Temperature Sensor was Ati X800 Series.

I know plenty of SS7s do. GLSysmon was a common one for Via boards

I'm pretty sure my Celeron "rig" has the temperature reading sensor because I could see the CPU temp in the BIOS (roughly 26°C on boot).
The Windows 98 PC runs on an AMD Athlon 6400 (I think), I know it's overkill for 98 and it's more likely an XP build (in fact I dual boot with XP just fine), but I managed to get all drivers working on 98 as well so... why not 😁

As for the 486 PC... well, if there isn't a temperature sensor, how can I check if it'll run ok ?

Used MBProbe on my Athlon rig back in the day, and still do. There's a hardware compatibility list in the included manual.html.

Elia1995 wrote:

As for the 486 PC... well, if there isn't a temperature sensor, how can I check if it'll run ok ?

Used to use one of those digital in/out thermometers with a probe to put outdoors, once they became cheap in the end of the 90's. Drilled a little hole in the CPU heatsink base for the probe. Worked surprisingly well 😀

I've always used speedfan. Itll work for 9x.

I use speed fan for all my rigs even socket 7 has sensors.

HWInfo still works, doesn't it?
https://www.hwinfo.com/txt/History3264.txt

I always go for Speedfan, i like that it can also silence my machines a bit with automatic fan controll. For that purpose, i can also recommend Rivatuner 2.24 that can control nvidia gpu fans on Win9x.

Use Speedfan 4.50, it is the last to work on Win9x without any problems. Speedfan 4.51 can also work, but it usually complains about administrator access which simply do not exists on win9x.

I'm now using Motherboard Monitor 5 which seems to do a pretty good job, I couldn't get SpeedFan to work on Windows 98SE, but it does work on Windows ME for some reason.

I don't remember what it was called, but I once used some program that monitored the temperature and fan speed (I think). As I recall, it had a pretty ugly interface with little B/W gauges for the different sensors.

kaputnik wrote:

Used to use one of those digital in/out thermometers with a probe to put outdoors, once they became cheap in the end of the 90's. Drilled a little hole in the CPU heatsink base for the probe. Worked surprisingly well 😀

You can get some cheap 1-wire sensor chips and route them through to your main computer for real-time graphing, logging, etc. With rj11 connectors or whatever they're pretty mobile, and you don't depend on the host computer.