NZXT updates system monitoring utility with gaming tweaks

NZXT has updated its CAM program—one of our favorite system monitoring utilities—with a face lift and some tweaks underneath the hood to make it run leaner "so you can get the best gaming experience."

"We always think of CAM as work in progress, looking for new ways to improve your ability to control and optimize your PC. Thanks to the usage metrics provided by CAM, as well as the feedback directly provided by our users, we are improving CAM to make it even easier to use and understand," says Johnny Hou, NZXT’s founder, and CEO. 

Beyond making the UI easier to navigate, NZXT claims that in most situations, CAM 3.5 barely touches the CPU, keeping usage under 1 percent and consuming just 120MB of RAM. In a quick look at the updated utility, we saw CPU usage jump to around 3 percent momentarily while navigating the UI before setting back at 0 percent, while using around 88MB of RAM.

NZXT also improved the Games page in CAM—it now allows you to see CPU and GPU temps at the same time, along with the FPS. In addition, NZXT bumped the history to 30 games, up from 8 games in the previous version.

CAM also includes a GPU overclocking feature that is in beta. The latest version raises the power limit from 120 percent, up from 110 percent, to potentially achieve higher clocks. Your mileage will vary, of course, and you'll want to keep an eye on temperatures when overclocking.

The new 3.5 release also takes into account newer CPUs and is now able to show up to 8 cores at a time on its graph, which is twice as many as before. That's still shy of the core counts on many high-end desktop (HEDT) processors from both AMD (Threadripper) and Intel (Skylake-X), but is enough to account for Ryzen (up to 8 cores) and Coffee Lake (up to 6 cores).

You can down CAM here.