Good Hardware Monitoring Gadgets

Hey there!

Anybody knows some good up-to-date hardware monitoring tools / gadgets? I've recently bought a new machine and Arma's running quite well on ultra settings. I'm happy with it though my curiosity strikes: I want to know how and how much Arma (and other games) use my resources. Last time I've made up a new machine from scratch was like five years ago, so I really don't know what tools are available / recommended nowadays.

Just for reference, here are my system specs:

Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3 @3.4Ghz

8GB RAM

Gigabyte H97-D3H-CF

PowerColor Radeon R9 280X TurboDuo OC

Crucial M500 120GB SSD

(Plus BeQuite PS and some harddrives...)

Windows 8.1 (x64)

Any ideas are appreciated! ;)

Core temp allows you to monitor all cores on your CPU as well as record and output info to a .csv file for evaluation. I believe that there is also a way to monitor your GPU with AMD Catalyst Control center and output the data as well.

Just curious, what kind of frames are you getting with ArmA 3? I'm thinking about building a new rig.

Thanks, those are some good hints! I'll go investigating later. And I'll do some FPS monitoring later and post my findings here. From top off my head it's running fluently with regular gameplay (i.e. the official campaign). However, there have been a few (temporary) drops when intensive AI calculations are done or a lot of stuff is running parallel (like explosions, particle effects + lots of AI in close range).

So, I did some testing using Core Temp, GPU-Z and Fraps. I'll save you the complete logs. For testing I played one smaller and one bigger SP editor scenario, ten minutes each.

Small scenario (infantry skirmish, around three squads operating at the same time, northern woodlands on Altis):

CPU Load: ~50% max on each core (4 cores, 8 threads)

GPU Load: 99% max <-- seems like the "limiting" factor in this case

FPS (Min, Max, Avg): 9, 62, 42.227 (loading screen and savegame included)

Big scenario at one of the research bases with lots of additional objects and more than 150 AI fighting around the facility:

FPS: ~20 (9-18 with all AI alive and after the fight around 24 with ~70 AI still alive.)

As for the latter scenario the FPS highly depend on what role the player takes. The way I took was being dropped by Littlebird right into the facility, covered by 6-7 active smoke emitters. Once the enemy AI spotted us FPS dropped to about 9. After the smoke vanished and all that spotting and shouting was over it was 18 at least. If you start the mission in a supporting role on a hill around 500m away FPS are way better, even if that insertion scene still happens (only just with AI).

For reference machine & settings below:

Arma 3 1.28 (stable)

1920x1080

Settings on Ultra (auto-detected and not tweaked)

3.8km View Distance

3.2km Object Distance

Windows 8.1 (x64)

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231v3 4x 3.40GHz (3.8 Turbo)

CPU Cooler: CoolerMaster Hyper T4 Tower Cooler

GPU: PowerColor Radeon R9 280X TurboDuo OC - 3GB

MB: Gigabyte GA-H97-D3H Intel H97

RAM: 8GB (2x 4096MB) Crucial Ballistix Sport XT DDR3-1600 DIMM CL9-9-9-24 Dual Kit

SSD: Crucial M500 120GB SSD

HDD: WD 1TB

PS: 530 Watt be quiet! Pure Power L8 CM Modular 80+ Bronze

Case: Fractal Arc Midi R2

I've bought everything new except the SSD and HDD and paid ~750€ for those components. Since I've been out of the hardware fiddling and overclocking stuff for years I followed a guide to quickly get a decent machine. Might not be a perfect selection and you might be able to get better stuff for smaller budget, I don't know. I'm happy with it, considering that we're still talking about Arma the results are okay I guess. And it looks quite pretty now. Amazing even compared to the cheap laptop I used for playing Arma before... ;)

Core temp has an android app that can connect to the core temp program on the PC and display it on the phone/tablet. I use it and it works just fine.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alcpu.android.CoreTempMonitor

Ah, thanks for the hint. Though I'm happy with my .csv output, it's perfectly fine for my purposes.^^