It seems that NVIDIA's removal of the hotspot temperature sensor from the GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" GPUs is not permanent, as the sensor data can still be accessed and the actual sensor is physically present. However, this is only possible with NVIDIA's internal tool called Modular Diagnostic Software (MODS), which isn't available to the public. According to Brazilian repair specialist Paulo Gomes, NVIDIA's MODS tool can still access the hotspot sensor. Readers may recall that back in January 2025, when the GeForce RTX 5090 GPU was reviewed , it was confirmed that NVIDIA had indeed removed the hotspot sensor reading API from "Blackwell." However, the company has kept access to "GPU Temperature" and "Memory Temperature" features for measuring the overall GPU temperature and its memory, making up for the absence of the hotspot sensor by keeping other features available.
For those who want to access the hotspot sensor on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 50 series, Paulo Gomes shows that it is possible through the use of MODS, which is an internal tool available only to NVIDIA employees in testing labs. Some builds have been circulating among repair technicians. The tool requires a bootable Linux drive and likely specific packages, making it difficult for the average enthusiast to set up. By connecting the tool from a remote server, the repair crew discovered that NVIDIA's thermal limit of 107°C had been reached five times in some hotspots on the GPU die, despite the average GPU temperature of the tested GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5070 Ti being around 68°C.