what is Thermal Sensor

[tainice]

i got myself a abit board, and there is this strange inside the box, and i believe it is a thermal sensor, but i have no idea what does it do. what is it? and what is it for?

[FrozenInHI]

It connects to the motherboard on a set of pins. If you put the other end of it someplace you want to monitor temperatures, then the bios and the monitoring program will report the temperature read by that thermal sensor. Very handy device. Here's what i'd do with it: put it under the heatsink NEXT to the core of the cpu, not on it! that way you could monitor the actual core temp of the cpu in relation to the bios' temp reading from the built in thermal sensor under the cpu, and determine if the bios temp is close to accurate. If the temp is accurate in the bios, then remove it from there and tape it to the back of the video card where the gpu is and that will monitor the gpu temperature for you.