As many know HWINFO64 and other tools expose a lot of sensor's information in your PC. The CPU is not an exception and as such you have a plethora of things to measure and track using such software. One of which is the VIDs for each CPU rail, the actual provided VCore, and on better motherboards, actual voltage for other rails too.

But people misunderstand these measurements. HWINFO has a polling rate by default of 2000ms and most sensors are instantaneous values. This means, HWINFO will show that sensor's value at the specific instant the polling happens.. Even if you lower the polling rate to say 100ms, data may seem to 'even out' as you multiplied the sampling by 20x, but this is not enough on processors that change PStates and VID requests at nanoseconds. Other values are weighed down, so the sensor already samples it internally and calculates an average before sending the value, so they cant be trusted either with this matter.

Because of this, I see lots of folks saying 'hey my Raptor Lake CPU doesnt go beyond 1.4v, so I am safe. NO, that is not how this works, your CPU may or may not go beyond that voltage and here is an example below

I have a stock 13600K, am on 107 microcode, no undervolt for now, ICCMax 260A, MCE disabled, IA CEP enabled, AC/DC LL to 1.1mOhms each. Only modification is a very tight PL1/PL2 just because my ITX cooler cannot handle more.

My VCore on HWINFO doesnt go beyond 1.3v, and VID just a little bit below at 1.29ish volts. So one would think I am on the safer side. But no. The actual way to know if your CPU hits a given voltage at any point in time is by using IA VR Voltage Limit* setting in your bios. This setting hard caps the voltage the VRM will feed to your VCore rail, and the neat part of it, is that HWINFO and other tools also track if performance is limited by this specific limit called IA: Electrical Design Point/Other (ICCMax, PL4, SVID, DDR RAPL). The other SoC domains have this sensor too (Ring, iGPU/GT)

After setting this value to 1.325v, I realized my CPU was constantly hitting 'Yes' on this limit while before it wasnt at all. Then I tried 1.35v, much less frequently but still hitting 'Yes' on this limit, specially on single core/light load workloads.

So my suggestion is this, for people that have HWINFO/other tools report under 1.4v peak VID/VCore at any given time:

1. Check whether on lightly threaded scenarios it hits 'Yes'. Why lightly threaded? Because ICCMax is another cause of this limit triggering, as this value is projected and not actual Current. You can disable E Cores momentarily to rule ICCMax out if you want.

2. (If it hits 'Yes') Check your ICCMax, if its still lowish and your VRM can handle it, increase it a little bit until the sensor goes 'No' at lightly threaded workloads (eg a single thread benchmark). Otherwise skip this step. If you are already on insanely high ICCMax, say >400A. Go for the bolded suggestion at the bottom of this post straight away and ignore steps 3-9

3. (If it stays on 'No') Set your IA VR Voltage Limit To something barely above your highest reported VCore. In my case I was getting 1.3v, I set it to 1.325v. I would say anything below or equal 1.4v should be good, but no one knows for certain really.

4. Save your changes and reboot.

5. Repeat the workload you used to measure your peak VID/VCore.

6. Check whether IA: Electrical Design Point/Other (ICCMax, PL4, SVID, DDR RAPL) changes to 'Yes', and how often it cycles between 'Yes' and 'No'

7. (If it does frequently) Repeat steps 3 but with a little HIGHER voltage (always staying under 1.4v).

8. (If it doesn't at all anymore) Repeat step 3 but with LOWER voltage.

9. Repeat steps 4-6.

10. (Optional) Track performance with benchmarks as the more you hit 'Yes' on this limit, the more limited boosting behavior will be, going for lower Pstates/clocks which will result in lower performance. I stopped checking when I felt I was hitting 'yes' very seldomly and single core performance was within 1% of my unlimited results.

People that are on values already higher than 1.4V can instead use this setting to hard cap your voltage to a safer value like 1.4v or below (no value is 100% safe, everything is conjecture as we dont know the design goals with this architecture, only Intel knows this). This will mean you will most likely lose performance, as you wont be able to reach the Boost PStates that required >1.4v at a given thermals/current as often. To regain the ability to hit these PStates again, you will most likely need to undervolt with IA CEP disabled to avoid clock stretching/losing performance

With this way, you will eventually narrow your actual peak VCore to a very small range, so you actually know for certain the CPU doesn't go beyond this value, in order to make better undervolting/RMA/etc decisions. Not everyone has oscilloscopes at home so I think this can help people out.

So i got a new gaming pc and just want to check it's thermals while gaming , i downloaded HWINFO64 from the wiki link in this subreddit portable version from the US local server .

My question HWINFO is safe right ? It has two exe one for 32 bit and one for 64 and while scanning virustotal showed the 32 bit one as malicious in a antivirus called secure age . I deleted it but I'm safe right ? I deleted the 32 bit one and start the 64 bit exe , it makes a temp config file next to the portable exe and runs

Also , does hwinfo affect performance, or battery life ? Does it repeatedly ping the GPU or the cpu if the program is shut down ? Does it modify any system settings or clock speed etc or it's purely for showing stats .. just want to check temps during and nothing else , how to set it up for that purpose ?

I'm new at this so any help would be appreciated

I have here my SSD result from Original SSD manufaturer program, CrystalDiskInfo & HWinfo64

Hwinfo reports that my SSD life span is about 5% but it seem the other 2 program is saying the health is still good?.. and should I be worried?

so what exactly is going on with this situation ? I just found out about it today, but I updated hwinfo like 4 days ago. Its worth mentioning i updated it from the program itself, I didn't click on any reddit links or anything like that. Do I have to wipe my ssds now ? I only use my computer for gaming and i barely have time to do that. There's really nothing I'd consider sensitive on there like credit card info or any saved logins. Just trying to find out how much factual information is related to this malicious code update I've been reading about and how worried I should be.

I wanted to download hwinfo for the first time so i went to its website and for the download options there were dAppCDN, SourceForge, Local (U.S.), SAC ftp (SK) which one should I choose for a person who is using Windows 11 and Living in not America

I checked out tech support page and downloaded HWinfo from there from the fast cdn option, but when I ran it in virus total it detected: only one from zillya Trojan.KryptikAGen.Win32.18722

is this false positive or and actual trojan?

I downloaded hwinfo from the sourceforge link on hwinfo.com and tested it using virustotal.com.

The security vendor "Zillya" detected "Trojan.KryptikAGen.Win32.18722"

I downloaded the same file from the "local" link on hwinfo.com and confirmed it is the same file as the one I got from sourceforge.

Is there anyway I can confirm that this file is actually safe?

Virus total doesn't detect anything in the portable download.

https://i.imgur.com/KjVjbYS.png

HWinfo64 shows that my NVME is currently at 83% remaining life, how accurate is that? and when it his 0% will be "useless"?

Link to snapshot of temps

The computer is in idle while downloading a drivers update in the background when I took the snapshot.

I just replaced my old 4090 after my screen kept going black and the gpu fans go crazy. I checked these metrics for the temps of the new gpu and my cpu and the current look so close to the max values. Is this normal or safe? I am using HWinfo v7.60-5170 to measure

I'm so confused at this. Sometimes when I play games my temp go as high as 80 but when I played Dragon's Dogma today my cpu skyrocketed to 87 and I'm on 720p still btw I have an RTX 3050 and my CPU is Ryzen 5 5600g with stock cooler. Is it normal for games to go that high temp? Or is HWINFO not accurate ? Because sometimes it has normal temps when I reset the HWINFO software.

wanting to download software to start monitoring my cpu temp, and after poking around, seems this one is the safest & most reliable. however, confused on whether to download the installer or the portable, as i don’t want it to download something additional onto my pc (which i heard is what coretemp will do). i’m not the most knowledgable when it comes to pc things, so if anyone could lend me some advice on how to go about the program, would be greatly appreciated

So i was monitoring some stuff and i randomly decided to check what options hwinfo had, until i found this: https://imgur.com/DRBVMgE

Thing is, afaik, all of those "magically update all of your drivers!!" tools are all else malware/viruses, else faking a free appearance behind a paywall, else installing wrong and shady drivers, else all of the 3 above.. The only legit one that i know is from Intel

And a quick look on reddit made me find old posts with people calling it malware, virus, "to absolutely not install", ect.

The redirected page from Hwinfo is pretty old-looking and doesn't work well, and absolutely does not look like the actual website from the driverfix company, wich is by the way indeed a paid solution to update your drivers.

So what exactly is going on?

UPDATE from 12th April 2026: This problem is fixed by the owner of the website. It's not a virus anymore.
But this post should be a example for the future to always be careful with downloading software from the internet. Even if you've trusted a website for years, you can still have bad luck like I did and download malicious software. Hackers always find a way to harm others. Unfortunately, such people do exist.

Post from 10th April 2026:

I want to warn you guys.
After a long time, i opening HWMonitor again on my PC.
it is version 1.42
i checked in the application if there was any update and yes.
the application told me to update to 1.63
i clicked on update and the official cpuid page open

i followed the page to download the latest version.
the file was called "HWiNFO_Monitor_Setup.exe"
after the download my Windows Defender instantly detecting a virus.
(because i am often working with programms which triggering the defender i just ignored that) i start the exe and a russian install programm opening...
i was confused and i canceld the installation.

i upload the file on virus total and i got this results:
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/eefc0f986dd3ea376a4a54f80ce0dc3e6491165aefdd7d5d6005da3892ce248f

i delete the exe after it.

a friend of me send me version 1.61 called "hwmonitor_1.61.exe"

no virus detected on my system and on virus total.

i checked the version history.
when i try to download 1.62 then the server gives me this "hwmonitor_1.62.exe"

after that i tried to change the download link from
cpuid.com/downloads/hwmonitor/hwmonitor_1.62.exe
to
cpuid.com/downloads/hwmonitor/hwmonitor_1.63.exe

and the download link was valid and seems be the original link!!! i got "hwmonitor_1.63.exe"
when i upload the "hwmonitor_1.63.exe" on virus total then there is also no virus..

So please guys be very careful what you download on the internet.
Even the most trustworthy websites can contain nasty traps.

If anyone knows how to contact the site operators as quickly as possible, I would be very grateful.

I saw that there's a contact form on the website...

But after what happened, I'm reluctant to enter my data like my email address on the website.