Libre Hardware Monitor: Features, Safety and Open Hardware Monitor Comparison

Libre Hardware Monitor (LibreHardwareMonitor on GitHub) is a free, open-source Windows program that shows live readings from your PC's sensors: CPU and GPU temperatures, fan speeds, voltages, load and clock speeds, plus drive and network activity. It started as a fork of Open Hardware Monitor, adds extra sensors the original never had, and is still actively developed on GitHub, while Open Hardware Monitor has not seen a release since December 2020.

This guide covers what Libre Hardware Monitor reads, how it differs from Open Hardware Monitor, whether it is safe to run, and where to get the genuine download.

What Libre Hardware Monitor monitors

Libre Hardware Monitor reads the sensors of motherboards, Intel and AMD processors, NVIDIA, AMD and Intel graphics cards, HDD, SSD and NVMe drives, and network cards, according to the project's README on GitHub. Each device appears as a tree in the main window with its current, minimum and maximum values side by side.

That makes the program useful whenever you want to know whether a PC is running hot or throttling:

• Checking CPU and GPU temperatures during games, renders or virtual machines.
• Verifying that fans spin up under load after a cooler or case change.
• Watching voltages and clock speeds after BIOS or overclocking changes.
• Logging sensor values to a file to review a crash or a slowdown later.

The program comes in two forms. The desktop app is a Windows Forms application that targets .NET Framework 4.7.2 and .NET 10.0. The same sensor code is also published as a library, LibreHardwareMonitorLib, which other tools build on. Sidebar Diagnostics, for example, used a Libre Hardware Monitor module to read Ryzen CPU sensors. For quick usage numbers without any extra software, Windows 11 can also display CPU, GPU and RAM usage natively, but it does not show fan speeds or voltages.

Libre Hardware Monitor vs Open Hardware Monitor

Libre Hardware Monitor is the actively maintained successor of Open Hardware Monitor: both share the same icon, interface and core sensor code, but Libre Hardware Monitor adds sensors and keeps up with new hardware. The fork began when Open Hardware Monitor development appeared to have stalled. Open Hardware Monitor resumed briefly in 2020, and its official site lists version 0.9.6 from December 27, 2020 (adding AMD Zen 3 support) as the latest release.

Both programs can run side by side, and the basic options are the same in each: start with Windows, switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit, and log sensor readings. If you still use Open Hardware Monitor on a recent CPU or GPU, Libre Hardware Monitor is the better choice simply because newer hardware gets added there.

The extra sensors in Libre Hardware Monitor

Libre Hardware Monitor shows more CPU temperature readings than Open Hardware Monitor: next to the current and maximum core and package temperatures, it adds CPU Core Distance to TjMax, Core Max and Core Average.

TjMax is the maximum junction temperature a processor is rated for; when the CPU reaches it, the chip throttles itself to prevent damage. Distance to TjMax is the headroom left: if a CPU is rated for 105°C and currently runs at 55°C, the distance to TjMax is 50°C. A shrinking value under sustained load is an early sign of poor cooling.

In the memory section, Libre Hardware Monitor adds virtual memory used and virtual memory available, in GB.

For storage, it goes beyond used space and lists write activity and total activity in percent, plus read rate and write rate in MB/s.

Network adapters, which Open Hardware Monitor does not list, show current load, data uploaded and downloaded in GB, and upload and download speed.

Is Libre Hardware Monitor safe?

Libre Hardware Monitor is safe when you download it from the official GitHub project: the full source code is public under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, and anyone can audit what it does. The real security question is the low-level driver that hardware monitors need to read sensors directly.

For years, Libre Hardware Monitor, Open Hardware Monitor and many fan-control and RGB tools relied on the WinRing0 driver. Microsoft Defender now detects the WinRing0x64.sys file as HackTool:Win32/Winring0 and quarantines it, because the driver gives programs broad access to I/O ports, MSR registers and the PCI bus and remains unpatched. That flag is about the driver's design, not about malware hidden in the app.

Recent Libre Hardware Monitor releases address this. Version 0.9.5 added an option to disable the Ring0 driver installation, and version 0.9.6 moved the bundled PawnIO modules to version 2.2 and fixed compatibility with the newer PawnIO installer, as listed in the release notes. PawnIO is a driver approach that uses signed modules for specific hardware access instead of one open-ended driver. If Defender flags an old copy, replace it with the current release instead of adding an exclusion.

Two more safety points: the developers state they are not affiliated with librehardwaremonitor.com and advise against using that site, and some sensors only appear when the program runs as administrator, so a missing reading is not necessarily a fault.

How to download and run Libre Hardware Monitor

Libre Hardware Monitor is downloaded from the Releases page of its GitHub repository; the AppVeyor build artifacts mentioned in older guides are no longer the place to get it. Check the version number on the Releases page and replace older copies with the newest tagged release.

1. Open the latest release page on GitHub.
2. Under Assets, download the release archive for the app (not the source code archives).
3. Extract the archive to a folder of your choice.
4. Right-click LibreHardwareMonitor.exe and select Run as administrator so that all sensors are available.
5. Expand the CPU, GPU, storage and network entries to see the readings; use the Options menu to start with Windows, change the temperature unit or enable logging.

If the program fails to start, install the .NET runtime it targets from Microsoft. Nightly builds are available through GitHub Actions for testing fixes before a release, but most users should stick to the tagged releases. To see which process is responsible for high load once you have spotted a hot CPU, open the Windows Resource Monitor next to it.

FAQ

Related: Open Hardware Monitor review, Sidebar Diagnostics hardware monitor, Windows Resource Monitor guide