3 Critical Stats Every PC Gamer Should Monitor

howtogeek.com:

Building a desktop gaming PC is a fantastic pastime, but games demand a lot from your PC. For that reason there are three critical statistics you should keep an eye on including component temperatures, frame rates, and disk health.

Unlike consoles and some pre-built PCs that are tested and re-tested, you won’t really know how well your PC works until you start using it. For that reason, it’s a good idea to understand if your PC is getting too hot, which can damage all those brand new parts. Plus, as time goes on components can degrade and perform worse over time. Keeping an eye on these three critical factors will keep your PC humming along, and alert you to when it’s time to fix something that’s gone wrong or replace a part.

Here are some tools to help you keep an eye on your PC and know when things aren’t working as they should.

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If there’s one critical factor for your gaming PC it has to be temperatures. When things get too hot, only bad follows. Your PC can start to struggle under load with stuttering, game crashes, or whole system crashes. If your parts stay too hot for too long they can also sustain damage. Most of the time that won’t happen, because a system will often shut down before the heat goes too far.

Still, there are surprises from time to time. Problems with some early Nvidia GeForce RTX cards such as faulty solder joints, as well as power draw issues, were exposed while playing Amazon’s demanding MMO, New World. Whether keeping a closer eye on temps may have prevented some of those cards from dying is unclear, but it may have.

When it comes to gaming there are two key components to monitor for high temperatures: the CPU and the