Best Program for monitoring CPU/GPU on XPS 15 w/OPTIMUS?

I installed cpu_z and hwmonitor, and neither will show my GT 420M. I'm looking for a single program (if possible) to monitor the temps while gaming. What does everyone use?

 

You have to be running a program that activates the GT 420M (in my case world of warcraft activates it) and then open the hwmonitor. After that the card should show up on the monitoring list. It kinda "hides" the card till its "activated" haha. Hope this helps!

 

I kinda figured that was the case, but I was hoping there was a program that could see the card without being activated. Right now I only have cod black ops, which makes you run steam. I guess I can create a rule that turns the card on when the steam.exe program is executed. Then I can see the temps before actually starting the game.

If anyone else has any suggestions, chime in! Thanks.

 

in ur control panel, under manage 3d settings > Program settings, can you just add hwmonitor? and then select the preferred graphics processor as the nvidia card.

 

I don't have a "manage 3d settings" in control panel. I couldn't find any way to do this through "program settings" either.

I did find a way though. After starting the game, I unselected full screen. Then I started hwmonitor, and it found the gt 420m, so I will just do it that way. This way is okay as I just wanted to check temps to make sure they are okay. I don't really game on this laptop or my $4K custom desktop, I have a ps3 and 360 for that. Playing games on this laptop is only when I'm away on vacation or something along those lines.

 

Gpu-z is able to monitor the gt 420m without the card being activated

 

Not for me. Any specific version or settings you did?

 

that's really strange. both manage 3d settings and gpu-z works fine for me. i'm using 266.58 w/ a modified inf from laptopvideo2go.

also, for me, when i try to access the control panel, the whole 3D settings section disappears but restarting fixes it.

 

Did you update your nvidia driver to the latest one from nvidia? I did and that caused the "manage 3d settings" option to disappear in the nvidia control panel so I rolled back my driver to the last Dell release and that fixed the problem.

If you have not updated the driver than maybe re-installing the latest one on the Dell site will fix it for you. I don't know if nvidia's driver is better or not. It probably is but, I want all my control panel options to be there when I want to change them. That glitch with the nvidia driver got it ousted from my laptop.