Erroneous temperature reported for Z270M-ITX/ac

PhantomMike wrote: Hi folks, just got this board and so far it is working well. The one thing odd is that hwmonitor is reporting a motherboard temperature of 118 degrees C for something it calls TMPIN6. All other temps appear to report within a reasonable range as expected. The other temp values from the motherboard vary in the typical 30-50 degree C range and are called SYSTIN, CPUTIN, TMPIN5, and TMPIN3. Temps reported by the CPU (i7 6700k) are also in the 25 - 60 degrees range. Just wondering if there is supposed to be a useful temperature here that is not reported properly or if it is overall just erroneous and can be ignored.

It's an erroneous reading that can be ignored. Very common, I have never seen a mother board that did not have at least one unused sensor chip output. Plus there are differences between AMD and Intel platforms regarding sensor data, and what mother board manufactures provide for each of their products. The potential examples of this are endless.

There are few standards for sensor chip readings/outputs, as we can see by the the generic names used, SYSTIN, TMPIN5, TMPIN6, etc. Some of the sensor outputs are not used by a board, and the data supplied by those outputs are just random data with no meaning. An example of that is your TMPIN6 reading.

Monitoring programs don't know what most of the reading's data belongs to, unless they are specifically programmed with information from mother board manufactures. That is a huge job, and most monitoring programs don't bother to do it. Plus the information is, from what I've heard, rarely provided. So it takes a lot of work to figure it out. Actually, the vast majority of sensor information provided by a mother board and the components used with a mother board is ignored by most monitoring programs, including the monitoring programs provided by the board's manufacture.

In this case, the program finds a data reading, gives it a name randomly, and includes it in its display. Interpreting it as a valid reading is left up to us.

One of the few monitoring programs that really attempts (and succeeds) in getting things right is HWiNFO. Of course it is not perfect, but I have yet to find a better overall monitoring program.

https://www.hwinfo.com/


Edited by parsec - 29 Aug 2017 at 8:24am

Thanks for your kind words! As mother boards become more sophisticated over time, we encounter more generically labeled readings, and unknown sensor readings. Plus mother boards use new sensor chips all the time, which adds to the problems with monitoring programs.

I think you'll be surprised by what you see in HWiNFO. There will be a few false, non-applicable readings, but what you will get should be more than you've ever seen before in one place.