You guys gotta hear this because it's one of those small but deeply satisfying wins for PC builders that has been rattling around in my head all morning — HWMonitor now shows thermal hotspot data specifically for RTX 50-series graphics cards and the context behind why this matters is actually kind of wild. Here's what was going on: previously, standard NVIDIA GPUs didn't expose their GPU hot spot via a public API at all so you could only see max, average, and memory temperatures; if your paste wasn't applied evenly or one section cooled poorly that hotspot would climb while the average looked fine — pure confusion. Now NVIDIA has opened up Hot Spot metrics through their driver APIs which means HWMonitor added explicit support for it on 5090s and 5080s after users asked, giving you an actual number to watch instead of guessing why your card is hitting high temps while looking "fine" in other tools. The hot spot isn't a single point but rather the hottest area of the die and tracking it separately from max temperature lets you diagnose poor thermal paste or uneven cooling without relying on guesswork — which, for a 5090 with the massive VRAM and power draw you need to keep an eye on, is genuinely useful. Also worth noting this isn't exclusive to 50 series — older Nvidia GPUs can display hot spot via debug drivers or specialized tools; it was just never exposed in standard monitoring software until now so that's why there's the specific callout for new cards.

Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/hwmonitor-now-shows-you-thermal-hotspot-data-for-rtx-50-series-graphics-cards-so-i-thought-id-give-one-of-ours-a-quick-test