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doobybiggs

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 5, 2012
562
24
Is there something better than iStat for getting all your info in one program. Mainly CPU and GPU temps.

Just curious on your thoughts before I drop $16 ...
 

GGJstudios

macrumors Westmere
May 16, 2008
44,556
950
Is there something better than iStat for getting all your info in one program. Mainly CPU and GPU temps.

Just curious on your thoughts before I drop $16 ...

You can use iStat Pro (free) or iStat Menus ($16) to get accurate readings of your temps, fan speeds, etc. A forum member has posted a copy of iStat Pro that has been "tweaked" to enhance compatibility with Mountain Lion. You can download it here.
 

justperry

macrumors G5
Aug 10, 2007
12,627
9,933
I'm a rolling stone.
iStaMenu's has problems writing to disk every few seconds now since they moved to 4.X, I had problems with it, the disk activity light were (almost) continuously on (Writes) because of logging, what is the purpose of such a light when iStatMenus is causing most of the writes!
They said they fixed it in 4.0.2, NOT.
So, I got rid of it, use MenuMeters, which I do for years now, it does not have temps but at least it does not have continuous writes to disk.
 

benwiggy

macrumors 68020
Jun 15, 2012
2,473
289
Is there something better than iStat for getting all your info in one program. Mainly CPU and GPU temps.
To be honest, there is no need to monitor these things for general use. OS X has perfectly good routines for monitoring and controlling all this stuff.

Unless you are having noticeable problems that you want to investigate, then you don't really need any of this.

The idea that you need to spend your time checking up on the OS and micro-managing what is does is crazy.

Let the operating system .... operate the hardware, and get on with watching videos of kittens or folding proteins or whatever it is. ;)
 

justperry

macrumors G5
Aug 10, 2007
12,627
9,933
I'm a rolling stone.
To be honest, there is no need to monitor these things for general use. OS X has perfectly good routines for monitoring and controlling all this stuff.

Unless you are having noticeable problems that you want to investigate, then you don't really need any of this.

The idea that you need to spend your time checking up on the OS and micro-managing what is does is crazy.

Let the operating system .... operate the hardware, and get on with watching videos of kittens or folding proteins or whatever it is. ;)

I have to agree here, I am more and more leaning towards not using any monitoring Menu Extras, it can come in handy when there are problems or when you just bought a new Mac to see everything is OK, but except for these reasons better get rid of these or disable them.
 

AppleNewton

macrumors 68000
Apr 3, 2007
1,697
84
1 Finite Place
Yeah alot of those apps can cause problems, iStat wether modded or not i no longer use (the dashboard widget). it always randomly would wake the second drive in my iMac or my time machine drive.

The only thing i generally used it for was with editing video and monitoring fan speeds to make sure they spun down properly and GUI for network connectivity but you can get better raw data through network utility anyways.

With any 3rd party plugins/apps/firmware/etc can cause small issues esp if theyre not properly supported. iStat was nice but again with what was said they dont offer much like they used to.

Best benefit, use the Apple hardware test to test or see any issues with your components.
 

LordDeath

macrumors member
Feb 28, 2013
69
85
I prefer System Monitor instead.
Instead of wasting my menu bar space with some useless app-icons I let Bartender hide most of them and use this new space for some valuable information about the status of my computer.
 

zonesey

macrumors member
Jul 13, 2009
78
14
Finland
Do ya'll know if any of these applications provide a GPU temp reading, GPU usage (%) and GPU memory usage right on the menubar?
 
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