Your temperatures, in the corner of the game.
A few numbers over whatever you are playing, and nothing else.
What it shows
What it refuses to do
- No injection into games. A layered window the desktop composites, not a hook in your renderer — which is why it is safe beside kernel anti-cheat.
- No writes to your hardware. No fan control, no overclocking, no voltage. Kent only reads.
- No logging, graphs, history or telemetry. Nothing is kept and nothing is sent.
Questions
Do I need to install a driver?
Not for the GPU — temperature and load work the moment you run Kent, with no driver and no administrator rights.
The CPU is different. Windows gives an ordinary program no way to read die temperature, so it takes a small signed kernel driver called PawnIO. Kent fetches the official installer, checks who signed it, and runs it — one consent prompt, no website to go find. It then puts a small background reader in place so the gauge keeps working without Kent itself ever running as administrator.
Skip it and Kent simply shows — for the CPU. It does not use
WinRing0, which Microsoft blocklists as a security risk.
Can this get me banned from a game?
Kent never touches the game. It is a top-most transparent window that the Windows desktop composites on top of everything, which is a completely different mechanism from the overlays that inject a DLL and hook the renderer to draw an FPS counter.
That choice is why there is no FPS or frametime counter, and there is not going to be one.
It does not show up over my game.
The game is almost certainly in true exclusive fullscreen, which bypasses the desktop compositor entirely — no overlay of this kind can appear over it. Switch the game to borderless or windowed and Kent comes back.
The alarm sound is deliberately not affected, because it is the one channel that still works while a game has the screen.
Windows warns me about the download.
Kent is not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen flags it the way it flags any new executable without a certificate. A signing certificate is the next milestone. Until then, the source is public and the installer is built from it.
Does Kent send anything anywhere?
No telemetry, no analytics, no account, no logs on disk. Kent makes exactly two kinds of network request, both only when you ask for them: fetching the PawnIO installer if you set up the CPU gauge, and checking for its own updates.
How do the alerts decide what is too hot?
By default, a fraction of your own part's thermal limit rather than a fixed number — 85 °C is routine on a part that throttles at 100 and alarming on one that throttles at 90. That is what makes the default correct on hardware Kent has never seen.
You can pin an exact temperature per part instead. There is one threshold, not one per channel: it governs the colour, the sound and the notification together.
Which hardware and languages are supported?
Intel and AMD Zen (family 17h and later) for the CPU; NVIDIA and AMD for the GPU. Windows 10 and 11, x64. The AMD paths follow the same registers as Libre Hardware Monitor but have not been run on real hardware yet — if you have an AMD machine, a probe report is the most useful thing you could send.
English, Português, Español, Deutsch, Français, Italiano, Русский, 中文 and 日本語, following your Windows display language, with a tray override.
Something is behaving oddly. What do I send?
Run kent.exe --probe. It writes kent-probe.txt beside the
executable: what Kent detected, which vendor libraries loaded, whether it is elevated,
and why a sensor is missing. Attach that to an issue — Kent keeps no logs, so it is
the whole picture.