Possible to add WiFi card temp sensor to HWiNFO Sensor Monitoring?

DDroid

New Member
I was messing around with the sensor probe in Linux and found that my Intel AX200 PCIe M.2 form factor Wireless Card has an accessible and readable temperature sensor. I was wondering if perhaps it may be possible to add this readable sensor to the device specific Network section within the HWiNFO64 sensors status window as well.

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I had tested to see if the temp increases or decreases depending on the throughput load requires, and it indeed does. When running an Internet Speed-Test the temp across the WiFi device quickly increased to 51°C, and once the test completed, the temps returned to near the ambient chassis temperature of 34-35°C.

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I am not sure if all WiFi adapters and card contain a temperature sensor however, this was the first I had learned of this on my own. It could be potentially helpful to monitor this in order to troubleshoot poor network throughput (due to possible thermal throttling if passing 60°C), or the like.
 
I checked this and it seems that reading this temperature directly from the WiFi hardware (at low level) is not trivial and might mess up with actual operation/driver.
A better solution would be if the driver would expose some interface providing this temperature, which seems to be the case in Linux. Unfortunately in Windows I haven't found such possibility.
 
The Mellanox network add-in cards also have a temperature sensor which is displayed in the Supermicro BMC. Since these are add-in cards, there must be a standard way the BMC uses to detect that a temperature sensor is available. The BMC also shows the temperature for the onboard Intel 10 GbE adapters.

Mellanox has a utility to show the temperature within the OS, so it must be possible without corrupting the driver. This works on Windows as well.
 
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That utility is specific to Mellanox adapters.
I have checked several documents that I have and several network adapters support temperature monitoring but the way how it's reported seems to be vendor- and model-specific without any standardized method. It looks like Linux drivers expose this temperature natively, but I don't think there's anything standard or native in Windows.
So it might be possible to support temperature readout on a per-model basis on Windows but only those adapters where this is documented.
 
That utility is specific to Mellanox adapters.
I have checked several documents that I have and several network adapters support temperature monitoring but the way how it's reported seems to be vendor- and model-specific without any standardized method. It looks like Linux drivers expose this temperature natively, but I don't think there's anything standard or native in Windows.
So it might be possible to support temperature readout on a per-model basis on Windows but only those adapters where this is documented.
How does the Supermicro BMC continuously monitor the Mellanox adapter temperature right from boot time without a driver at all? Presumably they have a supported list of hardware for which they detect the sensors, but there seems to be a way to poll the temperature directly from the hardware without affecting stability, independent of the OS that's running and any driver that's loaded.
 
How does the Supermicro BMC continuously monitor the Mellanox adapter temperature right from boot time without a driver at all? Presumably they have a supported list of hardware for which they detect the sensors, but there seems to be a way to poll the temperature directly from the hardware without affecting stability, independent of the OS that's running and any driver that's loaded.

Probably via Network Controller Sideband Interface (NC-SI) which should be connected straight to BMC, but not sure if this is also exposed outside the BMC.
This interface is available only on some (mostly server) adapters, just like the BMC.
 
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Yes, that should also be exposed from BMC and IPMI is supported by HWiNFO.
I wanted to monitor the same ConnectX-4 card in my desktop PC under load with the extra heat from the CPU and GPU. It's prone to overheating and dropping the link. There's no IPMI on my desktop. I had to put a 40 mm fan in my server next to the NIC to keep it under 105 C!
 
And is there any tool on your desktop able to show the NIC temperature?
Just the Mellanox mget_temp utility I linked above. It would be cool to integrate it into HWiNFO for logging purposes as a custom sensor.

Is repeatedly writing to the registry the only way to supply data?
 
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That would be nice but I'm pretty sure in this case it's using proprietary registers which are not published.
 
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