One of the most important components of our computer is the graphics card. An element that, for which, sometimes, we are willing to spend a lot of money, so it never hurts to have it low to control, to control its temperature, to avoid overheating or performance drops. To help us with this work, we can use an interesting and free application such as GPU-Z, which we are going to talk about today.
GPU-Z is a software developed by Techpowerup that will help us to provide us with vital information about our graphics card, being compatible with the three big manufacturers of the moment such as NVIDIA, AMD and Intel . With this precise monitoring tool, we will be able to know all the internal characteristics of our video card, showing us a wide and complete information that goes far beyond the model and its memory.
This application has support for creating log files and can be very useful to all those users who are looking to update their hardware to buy a video game with high graphic demand or simply to compare the configuration of our graphics card with that of other systems.
The main features of this application are:
- Supports NVIDIA, AMD, ATI, and Intel graphics devices
- Displays information about the adapter, GPU, and display
- Displays overclock, default clocks, and 3D clocks (if available)
- Includes a GPU load test to verify PCI-Express lane configuration
- Results validation
- GPU-Z can create a backup of your graphics card BIOS
- No installation required, optional installer available
- Support for Windows XP / Vista / Windows 7 / Windows 8 / Windows 10 (32-bit and 64-bit versions are supported)
All the details to know in depth our graphics with GPU-Z
Once we execute the application, its main menu appears with a simple interface where all the information is displayed in four tabs. Here we will find the functions of “Graphics Card”, “Sensors”, “Advanced” and “Validation”. Each of them will provide us with different types of information related to our graphics card, as we will see below.
Graphics Card
In this section we find all the detailed information about our graphics card. Among it we can see in detail, the name, the technology used, the release date, type of memory, certification, manufacturer, BUS used, size, etc. Some of the most interesting and useful data are the frequencies of both the GPU and the VRAM and especially the BIOS version .
Another extremely interesting option that we will be able to perform is to check the speed of the PCIe under stress conditions. To access it we must click on the question mark that we find right next to the “Bus Interface” box.
Sensors
We now go to the Sensors tab where we can see detailed information about the sensors of our graphics card, showing in real time all its parameters along with the global temperature of the CPU. In this section we can see information about the voltage of the GPU, the used memory of the system, the load of the memory controller, the speed of the fans, the maximum temperature or the minimum frequencies, among other characteristics. By clicking on the values of each parameter we will have several options with which to have a more exhaustive control of them.
In the event that we are interested in analyzing the GPU data at a later time, the application allows us to save the data obtained in a log file. To do this, it will only be necessary to check the “log to file” box that we find in the lower left part of the window. Later we only have to select the desired location to save it and we will obtain a TXT file with all the data.
Advanced
From this “Advanced” section we can see much more important information, both from our graph but also from the most popular APIs and detailed information on its different components. When accessing for the first time we will see by default how the “General” tab appears where we will find information related to the latest version of our driver. If we click on it, a drop-down menu will open with the NVIDIA or AMD BIOS, WDDM, DXVA, DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11, DirectX 12, OpenCL, CUDA and Vulkan tabs.
Validation
GPU-Z also has a tab called “Validation”, which we can use to upload a capture of our data to the TechPowerUP website. This is something that we can use to request assistance from the program developer in case we need it or share any problems that we may have found that can help us solve it. More advanced users can use it to show all the performance that their graphics card can achieve, validating with the provided capture that the specified data is real.
GPU-Z Free Download
If we want to use GPU-Z to monitor our graphics card, we can use it for free for both domestic and commercial use that we can download from its website . A GPU-Z DDK is also offered which provides us with an easy to use DLL with a full set of features. It is compatible with Windows, from its version of XP to Windows 10, in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
The latest version available is v2.38.0 corresponding to March 12, 202 1, which shows great support and update policy from its developers, keeping the application up to date with bug fixes and improvements in its different sections .
Alternatives to GPU-Z
If we are looking for a program with which to monitor our graphics card, we propose some alternatives to GPU-Z that we can take into account:
MSI Afterburner
It is one of the most complete programs to monitor our graphics card, offering us high control over it. It is responsible for providing detailed information on all the hardware, carrying out a complete monitoring of all the parameters that influence our graphics card such as: clock speed, RAM use, fan speed and CPU use. We can download MSI Afterburner from this link.
FurMark
This program has been developed to determine the state of our graphics card. For this, it is in charge of carrying out different tests to check if everything works correctly or if there is a problem. It also has a graphical temperature monitor to optimize chassis cooling. We can download FurMark for free from here.