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GPU Observer provides you with a very useful Windows Vista and 7 gadget for monitoring your graphics adapter in real time. Although its development is currently stopped, this witty gadget supports NVIDIA cards up to GTX 600 series and, supposedly, AMD cards as new as the HD 7000 series.

While it does not feature the same technology as RivaTuner, AIDA64 or GPU-Z use, GPU Observer does a pretty well job at displaying the temperature of your VGA adapter as well as other information regarding its fan speed, core and memory clocks. Optionally, the gadget also shows the GPU, VPU or even memory loads.

Due to the beta testing version of GPU Observer, all of these features have the “if supported” note, so you shouldn’t really ask for much in case your graphics adapter’s statistics cannot be monitored. In all the other cases, this gadget does a very good job by constantly notifying you of the current state of your video card.

Windows 8 users can also run GPU Observer by tweaking their system with available utilities that bring back the Gadgets item in the context menu of their desktop. The interface of this particular application is neat and well-designed. The values are clearly painted on top of its background, while the dump file creation option can log the values within a file stored on the desktop of your PC.

GPU Observer has the advantage of being an independent program. Other gadgets from its category usually require additional software in order to be able to display the needed information. On the downside, GPU Observer lacks support for multi-card display as well as resizing. For each and every GPU you might have, you must run separate threads of GPU Observer and select the one you want to monitor within their corresponding configuration panels.

The bottomline is that GPU Observer proves to be a rather interesting gadget for mainly monitoring the temperature of your VGA card(s). Supporting the majority of non high-tech adapters, it may prove to be one of your most trustworthy desktop companions, if not the only one.