The first thing you need to understand when trying to monitor temperature in your laptop is to know what you're monitoring. Specifically, in this article, we're monitoring your laptop video card's temperature. We're not talking about the CPU or hard disk drive's temperature - those are the topic of another article .

Note that there are two main dedicated laptop graphics cards in the market: those mobile nVidia cards and those mobile ATI cards. This article applies to both types of card.

The next step is to know what is the temperature limit for your laptop video card. You need to consult the laptop manual to identify the graphics card that's in your laptop. Then you need to go to the video card manufacturer and find out the physical temperature limit of its Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

The next thing to do is to get a suitable tool to monitor your laptop video card's temperature. I usually like to use a tool called RivaTuner for this purpose. It's a great piece of software that is small and easy-to-use.

In RivaTuner, you should go to Settings, select Run at startup and uncheck all options except Core Temp. You should also settings so core temp is shown in the Hardware Monitor window.

Once you're set up RivaTuner, you need to test it out. What you ened to do is to run an intensive 3D game (e.g. Call of Duty) or a 3D Benchmark program, with RivaTuner running in the background. When the game launches, notice that you can monitor your laptop video card's temperature on the upper left of the game screen. Cool eh? Make sure that number stays well below the recommended temperature limit.

Once you've got the hang of monitoring your laptop video card's temperature, it's important to keep it going. Continue to monitoring the video card's temperature in future, making sure it stays well below the recommended limit.