No temperature monitors for Intel Macs?

Question

I found the below in the FAQ for the application 'Temperature Monitor' and thought it might helpful to understand why we don't have a temperature monitoring application, or perhaps never will. SInce we do have the speedit.kext way to read CPU temperature, perhaps at least that is possible to implement in a standalone application.
Q: I am using the latest release of the application which should support my computer, but still no sensor at all, or only a S.M.A.R.T. hard drive temperature sensor is found. Is this normal?
A: Unfortunately there are some specific Macintosh systems which don't allow that sensor values can be read out by a normal application program. There are two different cases:
The computer uses a self-contained cooling control system. The hardware itself controls its own monitoring. No transfer of data from the sensor to the operating system is possible because there is no bus connection between the sensor and the actual computer.
The computer contains sensors accessible via a data bus, but cooling control is independent of Mac OS X. Apple does not provide any device drivers which would allow application programs to get data from the sensor. Only the firmware or a closed part of the operating system core has access to sensor data.
In both cases, it is not possible to develop an application program which could read out sensor values. The following Macintosh systems are affected by this problem:
PowerBook G4 Titanium (all models)
eMac (all models)
iMac G4 (all models)
Mac mini (all models)
Note that Intel-based Macintosh systems use a special mix of the mentioned monitoring techniques: Mac OS X only uses the load sensor of the graphics chip for thermal management. This sensor can be displayed by Hardware Monitor without any problems, it is however not displayed by Temperature Monitor, because this sensor does not measure temperature.
All other sensors in Intel Macs are controlled by special hardware working independently of the operating system, the Apple System Management Controller. This device has not been disclosed by Apple. There are neither drivers for Mac OS X, nor any documentation, and all details related to the function of this chip have been "censored" by Apple in the source code of Darwin. For this reason it is currently impossible that any application program could get readings from this chip.

Answer 1

"Mac OS X only uses the load sensor of the graphics chip for thermal management"
Yes and no. But, this doesn't really seem to be the case! If this is true, simply running Quake4 SHOULD cause the fans to kick on as the GPU is being heavily used. This did not happen on my machine. Only after reapplying the thermal paste would both fans kick in during heavy use. My guess is that it is actually a mix of conditions that cause the fans to operate at different levels. Heat pipe temp + GPU load + ...
I think one variable that is not being used is processor temp. I can't really understand why not though because that would go a long way to alleviating some of our heat problems and the fans would operate in a semi-normal fashion even if the processor/heat pipe connection is suboptimal.
Message was edited by: Daffy_Duck