Paulo Gomes team shows how to reach NVIDIA GPU memory temperatures per module
Following the disclosure of the hotspot temperature on NVIDIA RTX 50 GPUs recently, Paulo Gomes Team has found yet another hidden feature. A way to read temperature data from individual memory modules on several generations of NVIDIA GPUs. The method provides more detail than the single memory temperature value currently shown by monitoring software.
The discovery currently works with mobile GPUs using GDDR6 memory. It also works with desktop GeForce RTX 30 and RTX 40 Series cards equipped with GDDR6X. The team has not yet enabled the same readings on desktop GDDR6 cards.
We found individual temperature sensors on each memory module, something Nvidia has never made publicly available.
That’s right: the temperature of each chip, one by one, not an average or a generic value. And we also discovered that the temperature reported by the software was always the hotspot temperature, never the average.
— Paulo Gomes (translation)
The data is accessed through memory-mapped I/O, or MMIO. It identifies the temperature associated with each memory channel and can be matched to the physical modules installed around the GPU. The tool can also identify channels that are disabled or unavailable on a specific GPU configuration.
Monitoring software already reports memory temperature, but not per module
According to the team, the memory temperature already displayed by applications such as GPU-Z represents the hottest available sensor reading. It is not an average across all memory modules . Tests on a GeForce RTX 3080 showed one channel reaching 86°C while other readings remained lower.
Individual readings can help identify uneven thermal pad contact or a memory module operating at a higher temperature than the rest. This may also assist with diagnosing crashes caused by one memory module without relying only on the highest reported temperature.
The same team previously demonstrated access to hidden hotspot temperature data on GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs. It plans to provide the memory sensor findings to hardware monitoring developers. GDDR7 support is still under study, while a public tool may require an unsigned MMIO driver that Windows Defender could block.
NVIDIA stays silent
We reached out to NVIDIA for its position on the hotspot temperature issue, but the company did not respond to our request. As noted before, NVIDIA’s silence on these newly discovered sensor readings does not help users or monitoring software developers. Paulo has also confirmed that his team is already working to enable the same per-module temperature readings for GDDR7 memory.
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