Is Psensor Inaccurate?

[Diet Depressoh]

So for the past few months my distro was Ubuntu 18.04.LTS and to keep track of my temps, I installed Psensor and the temps for my gpu, a Nvidia GTX 1050ti in normal was low 30C degrees and in an intensive game it would rise to about 65C while my cpu, a Ryzen 5 2600x, in normal was around low 40C and in an intensive game around high 60C. I distro switched from Ubuntu to Mint and everything has been going smoothly. However when I installed Psensor from the software manager, the temps for my cpu on normal has been high 80C and I haven't ran a game yet so I can't say for what Psensor would show in an intensive game.

I highly doubt my cpu is actually is high 80C or else my cpu couldn't handle it and my pc would crash frequently. Its clear Psensor isnt working and I uninstall and reinstalled it but it still shows wrong data. How do I fix this?

[Zyro]

You need to run lm-sensors once.

https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Lm_sensors/

[Aoi Blue]

psensor will often not correct sensors but instead read their raw value. That means if the sensor is not properly calibrated on the board, it will get a bad value.

As of CPU temperatures. They will commonly skyrocket to high temperatures, especially if you have a lower grade motherboard, fan and/ore case. There are mechanisms in there to prevent them from overheating at the cost of performance and this keeps them from crashing.

You should make sure your computer's cpu frequency handler is set to on-demand or schedutils (depending on what works best for your exact system) and not "performance."

The "Performance" mode basically does not permit your CPU to enter power save mode other than for short period through c-state functions. This basically skyrockets temperatures for no performance gain, often resulting in actual performance loss, as it effectively disabled the boost function that allows higher clock speeds on a single core when running tasks limited to a single thread.

You should instead use on-demand or schedutils. These two options bring power as needed, the on-demand based on use, and the schedutils based on the scheduler's queue.

Schedutils has far more potential but it's new so it's not fully optimized yet, so you may still get better performance with on-demand. Schedutils has received far more attention in the mobile market that requires a far more responsive balance not able to be provided by other cpufreq setups. Loads more typical of the performance workstation and gaming market have not received near the attention.

Personally, while my CPU runs nice and cool. I have a very good motherboard, case and fans. I also have my fans set to be quite a bit more aggressive than the default "silent" setting. My GPU, an RX480, never seems to need to spin up it's fans more than the slightest bit. I'd say it's broken on that but it's cool as a cucumber. The crossblow from the case fans is just that good.

[thetargos]

Usually I corroborate the readings from sensors in the OS with the readings off the firmware of the main board at idle. What I do miss for my MoBo (Asus Crosshair Hero VI, Ryzen first gen AM4 370 chipset) is the ability to get fan speeds as the board sports an ITE87 sensor chip, which has no longer out of tree driver support. The K10 driver does a nice enough job at getting the temps, though.

[Aoi Blue]

Running LM-Sensors will correct some of the sensors, sometimes.

Besides, you should only worry about the delta (change) on the sensor, not the exact value. Nearly all modern hardware has limiters to prevent overheating.

[Diet Depressoh]

So a few days after I made this post, I booted up mint and opened up Psensor to see that the readings were actually correct and my cpu tempts were normal, so far it has stayed this way. I have no idea what fixed it cause I haven't done anything to it yet but it seems to work just fine so I'm not gonna question it for the time being. Odd though.

[Zyro]

One reboot to few...?

[Aoi Blue]

Sometimes the initial detection by the kernel utilize the wrong modules. By running the sensors detect program it loads the right modules.

This is the most common case of sensors suddenly reading the right values even if no additional values are displayed.