PWR
Power stock rockets 337 W as Aliens: Dark Descent opens
19h ago
A 1 Hz recorder listens to your hardware, and captures a tick every second. Fifty-two data points in all, stemming from your processor, graphics card, memory, drives, the network, wall socket and beyond. Then it hands them to a charting terminal built with the rigour and complexity of best in class market software.
Overview
Trading terminals have had decades of work poured into one problem: making a river of numbers legible. Candles, envelopes, distributions, screeners, a tape running across the top. That craft is real, and most of it has nothing to do with money. It is about reading a signal over time.
SystemChart wires that craft to a recorder sitting on your own hardware. One tick a second, fifty-two data points on every tick, kept at full resolution for as long as you want them. Nothing averaged away, nothing summarised into a five minute blur.
What comes out is a terminal for a single machine. Same instruments, same discipline, different subject. The questions turn out to be the same ones: what was normal, when did it change, and what moved with it.
Sixty ticks a minute. 86,400 a day. Every part of the machine read on the same beat, so a moment can be read straight down.
Plus a set for every application you tag and every game you play. The full list is further down.
2.8 bytes a data point, packed. Two months costs a few hundred megabytes, and a licence lets you keep the lot.
Every process it runs, added up, while it sits in the tray. Measured on a real machine, not estimated. The counters are already being kept by Windows and your drivers. Reading them is the whole cost.
A SQLite file on your disk and a port on loopback. Diagnostics go nowhere until you press the button that sends them.
Idle, the recorder eases to a tick every five seconds and comes straight back the moment anything happens. Set it to a flat 1 Hz and it never eases at all. Games always get the full rate.
Three idle rates, said in hertz, with the recommended one marked. Whatever you pick, a game or a busy machine still gets the full 1 Hz tick.
Two months without a licence, at the full tick, with nothing averaged down. With one, each budget is labelled with how far back it reaches on your machine, at the rate you are actually writing. Choose no limit and nothing is ever dropped.
The instruments
Candles, ribbons, distributions, ranked screeners, stacked breakdowns and heat strips. Moving averages, rate of change, dispersion, envelopes and operating zones on any line. Every chart is drawn from ticks, so zooming in goes all the way to the second rather than to whatever bucket a summary left behind.
RSI and MACD are missing on purpose. Both assume a price set by an auction. A processor at 100 per cent is not overbought. It is busy.
Everything the machine reports is a symbol you can chart: the hardware, every application you tag, every game you play. Put a frame rate against a board temperature, or one application's memory against the whole machine's, on one panel and one clock.
A line on its own is a number with a shape. Operating zones mark where a reading left its own normal range, fixed levels mark the ones with a meaning on any machine, and time nobody captured is drawn as a break instead of a smooth ramp from bedtime to breakfast.
A distribution answers the question a line cannot: how much of the range was spent up there. A ranked screener puts every part in order with its own peak marked. A heat strip lays the whole machine out as bands sharing one clock, so a moment can be read straight down.
Pro Manual studies
A trading terminal ships with a hundred indicators and most of them are a category error on a computer. RSI, MACD and the stochastics all measure mean reversion in a price discovered by an auction. Volume studies need a volume. Fibonacci retracements need a crowd.
Six survive the translation, because they measure level, trend, dispersion or a limit, and those belong to a signal rather than to a market. Put any of them on any line, on any page, with your own period, your own colour and your own thresholds.
Graphics opened soft and never left the band. The exponential mean sat under nine per cent for the whole session and never turned over, which is the tell that there is no trend here to find. Anything you could call a move lasted one tick.
One print at 22 per cent broke the upper envelope at 16:11 and closed back inside on the very next reading. The session low of 3 per cent came four minutes earlier. Both are marked, because High / low marks them. Neither is a story, and the tape agreed by staying quiet about both.
Thermals never got interesting. The core held 43 degrees against a fan loafing at 31 per cent, a long way below the 80 degree line, so the cooler is holding this with most of its range spare. Board draw averaged 80 watts and touched 110 on the spike.
Read together: an idle card doing short bursts of nothing very much. Which is the correct answer, and took four studies to be confident of.
No position in any of the hardware mentioned.
Moving average
The mean of the last N points. Flattens the noise so the level shows.
Exponential MA
Weighted towards recent points, so it turns sooner than a plain mean.
Normal range
A rolling mean plus and minus N deviations. Outside it is unusual for this window.
Rate of change
Change per minute. This is the one that finds a memory leak or a thermal ramp.
Limit line
A constant you care about. A thermal ceiling, a power budget, a refresh rate.
High / low
The highest and lowest reading across the window, marked where they happened.
Every study carries the sentence explaining what it measures, and the foot of the menu states plainly why the famous ones are missing. A tool that quietly offers you something meaningless is worse than one that offers less.
One button draws a normal range, the heavy and idle zones, and every excursion out of them, on every chart on the page at once. That part is free and on by default. Pro is the part where you pick the period, the source and the line.
Studies live on the page you drew them on, and a page is yours to keep. Add drawing tools, custom limits, Compare and repeated experiments on top, and every one of them still reads without a licence once it exists.
The tape
Every chart in the application answers a question you already had. The tape answers one you did not. It runs under the tabs the way a wire service runs under a broadcast, and it is the only surface here that volunteers anything.
It is written the way the market is written, because the market already solved this problem. Each hardware family is a stock. Something that rises firms, climbs, gaps up or rockets, in that order, depending on how far it went. Something that falls eases, slips, drops or craters. A reading pinned at its ceiling is halted. Two readings that move as one are in lockstep. One that leaves and comes back made a round trip.
Nothing is ranked by recency. Every candidate headline is graded on how far outside this machine's own ordinary it sat, and only the strongest survives per symbol, so one loud event cannot take the whole tape. Click a headline and it opens onto the captured ticks behind it, with the before and after figures and the exact window they came from.
Nothing on it is predicted, and nothing on it is advice. A quiet machine gets a quiet tape, which is the answer you want most days.
Eight it wrote about this machine, unedited
PWR
Power stock rockets 337 W as Aliens: Dark Descent opens
19h ago
GPU Capped
GPU clock stock halted at 2955 MHz for 9 minutes
19h ago
NET Top Retrace
Network stock round trips to 986.4 Mb/s and gives it all back
20h ago
CPU
CPU stock sets a session high at 100%
44m ago
GPU
VRAM stock gaps down 3.9 GB as Counter-Strike 2 closes
3d ago
NET
Network stock sells off 31.9 Mb/s on the handoff from Visual Studio Code to Edge
2h ago
MEM
Memory stock sets a session low at 15.5 GB
4h ago
GPU
GPU clock stock gaps up 1648 MHz with no name on the trade
3h ago
Every one of those is a restatement of something measured, and every one opens onto the ticks it was made from. Notice how many say with no name on the trade when they run in the application: nothing was running that explains the move, and saying so is more useful than picking a culprit.
Every tick
Fifty-two data points about the machine itself, plus a set for every application and a set for every game. Graphics telemetry comes off the card where the card reports it. Where the card stays quiet, vendor neutral counters take over and the rest is left blank instead of filled with a guess.
Frames are the exception. They are counted as the game presents them, at its rate and not the recorder's, so a session at 240 Hz is measured at 240 Hz. When data points are added they are listed in the changelog, with the version they arrived in.
Cost tracker
The recorder already measures watts at the wall, so the only thing standing between that and money is a number off your electricity bill. Type in what you pay per kilowatt hour and every chart of power becomes a chart of spend.
One number, in pence or cents per kilowatt hour. It is on every statement, usually beside the standing charge.
Running cost takes the tariff and your processor's rated power. Nothing else is needed and nothing is sent anywhere.
Cost per hour sits in the live ticker. The power page breaks the draw down by part, so you can see what is actually spending it.
Processor, graphics card, platform and the loss in the power supply itself, and the four add up to the reading at the wall. A machine idling at 90 W and one idling at 180 W are a real difference in what you pay, and until it is charted nobody notices either.
Set the tariff and it applies to everything already captured, not just to what happens next. A year of history becomes a year of spend the moment you type it in.
Assistant
SystemChart holds millions of ticks that no chat window can read on its own. So it exposes them the way a database exposes rows: as a set of tools an agent can call, each one running a real function over your stored readings and handing back a figure it did not invent.
The model has no other route to a number. It cannot see the ticks, it cannot round one, and it cannot average two in its head. If it says 0.95, a correlation ran. Under every answer sits the list of tools it called, so you can go and check.
Use the panel in the window, or point the assistant you already pay for at this machine over Model Context Protocol and never open SystemChart at all. Either way it is a model you choose and a bill you own; the application ships with no key.
Paste an endpoint and a key and the panel opens beside your charts. A model on the same machine needs no key at all, and Ollama, LM Studio and Foundry Local are one click each.
SystemChart is also a Model Context Protocol server, so the assistant you already pay for can read this machine directly. Settings writes the whole configuration block with the real path in it, for Claude Desktop or for VS Code, and copies it on one button. Between reading about this and using it sits a paste and a restart.
Windows encrypts any key you set under your account before it goes near the disk. The window that set it never gets it back.
The chips under an answer name every tool that ran to produce it. Open the same page over the same window and the same numbers come up, because they came from the same readings.
Ask about a window with no ticks in it and it says so. A reading that never moved gets named as such rather than reported as a zero, which is the difference between a steady fan and a fan that has stopped.
Put to gpt-5.4-mini through Azure AI Foundry, against this machine's own 24.9 million readings. Three consecutive turns, unedited, tool names as the panel prints them.
My machine felt slow last night. Anything actually happen, or was it me?
Probably not much was wrong.
Over the last 12 hours, the charts show:
What I do not see is a clear sustained spike in disk latency, GPU load, or a hard CPU bottleneck. There was a brief CPU max, but the summary does not show a lasting event.
I’ve opened the Overview page at 12h so you can look at the same window. If you want, I can narrow it to last night and check for a specific spike or change point.
That power spike, what was the graphics card doing at the same moment, and did it get hot enough to matter?
At the power step, the GPU was also active: power and GPU load moved together very closely, with correlation 0.9738 and no lag.
What the GPU was doing:
Did it get hot enough to matter?
I’ve put the GPU page in front and set it to 12h so you can inspect the same window. If you want, I can look for the exact power step timing against GPU temp or fan behavior.
Which application costs me the most processor over a normal day, and is that reasonable for what it is?
The biggest processor user over a normal day was AliensDarkDescentGameSteam-Win64-Shipping at 17.74% of the whole machine.
Is that reasonable? Yes, for a game that’s a plausible CPU share, especially on this machine:
Other notable users were:
There was also 1.36% not attributed, which means some short-lived processes were seen between sampling walks.
Every figure above came out of a function that ran over stored ticks. 0.9738 is a correlation computed in C# over the instants both readings share. 17.74% is an average of the per process walk across a day. The model cannot round one, average two or produce a third, because it has no route to a number except through a tool. The third answer names its own blind spot without being asked to: work too short-lived for the walk to catch is reported as unattributed rather than blamed on whichever application happened to be nearby.
Twenty tools it can reach for
Sixteen of these only read. The four that change something change what is on screen and stop there. None writes a tick, deletes one, or touches capture, settings or licensing. An instruction smuggled into a window title earns you a wrong answer and no wrong actions.
The panel in the window and the tool server offer the same twenty. A test compares the two lists against each other on every build, because they drifted apart once and the only thing that noticed was a real question getting a worse answer in one place than the other.
While you play
The counter is its own click through window sitting above the game. Nothing gets written into the game process, so anti-cheat has nothing to object to and antivirus has nothing to quarantine.
Ten fields to choose from and a corner to put it in. Frames get captured whether the counter is showing or not, at the game's own rate, so every session leaves a page behind with its lows, its worst frames, and how it compares to the last time you played.
Settings
Everything the application can be told is in one place, on the same glass the installer is made of. Nothing here reaches a server. There is no profile to sign into, no sync, and no setting whose real purpose is to sell you the next tier.
Most of it you will set once and forget. The tick rate, how far back to keep, and which corner the frame counter sits in are the three that actually matter on day one.
Capture
The recorder runs at 1 Hz and eases off when the machine is idle. You choose how far it eases: 1 Hz always, or down to 0.2 Hz or 0.1 Hz while nothing is happening. Games and anything over 25 per cent load always get the full rate whatever you pick, so a session is never sampled thinly.
Start with Windows lives here too. Capture is worth leaving on because the span you can look across is the span you captured, and a gap cannot be filled in afterwards.
History
Every choice is annotated with what it buys on your machine, measured from your own last day of capture rather than from an average of somebody else's. This one writes about 22 MB a day, so it prints the real span beside each size.
Free reaches back two months. Pro removes the limit entirely. Either way the only thing that ever deletes a reading is the size you chose yourself.
Frame counter
Ten fields, four corners, a size and an optional dark plate. The sketch is live, so choosing a corner shows you the corner instead of asking you to start a game and find out.
Frames get captured whether the counter is showing or not, so turning it off costs you nothing in the record.
Appearance
Six colour themes and seven finishes for the window icon, the taskbar button and the tray. The tray gets its own choice for while capture is stopped, so you can tell at a glance without opening anything.
Motion is here as well: none, standard, or charts that flow continuously between readings instead of stepping.
Running cost
One number, entered once: the unit rate off your electricity bill. From then on the wall reading is also a price, per hour, per session and per game.
Nothing is looked up and no tariff is guessed. If you leave it blank the app charts watts and says nothing about money.
Agent
Pick a provider, paste an endpoint, and the assistant panel opens beside your charts. A model on the same machine needs no key at all. Windows encrypts any key you do set under your account before it touches the disk, and the window that set it can never read it back.
Underneath sits the tool server block, written out with the real path already filled in for Claude Desktop or VS Code, copied on one button.
About
Version, edition, whether this copy came from Steam or direct, how long the recorder has been up, how many readings it holds, how many sessions, the size of the archive on disk and who the licence belongs to.
It is a status page, not a storefront. Nothing on it asks you for anything.
Nothing you captured is ever locked away, and a page built in Pro still reads without it. Pro buys a memory that goes back years, a model you can ask about your own machine, and the tools for building your own views and marking up your own charts.
Six colour themes
All dark, and green stays up and red stays down in every one of them. A theme changes the room the charts sit in, never what a reading says.
Graphite and Terminal complete the set. All six are one click in Settings.
| Surface | Free | Pro adds |
|---|---|---|
| Capture | Every data point, the full 1 Hz tick, autostart, pause and resume | Nothing. Capture is never gated. |
| History | The last two months, at full resolution, nothing averaged down | As far back as the disk you give it, up to no limit at all |
| Pages | Overview, Capture, CPU, GPU, Memory, Drives, Network, Power, Machine | Pin and rename tabs, editable copies, blank pages, the chart palette, saved layouts |
| Applications and games | Attribution, tags, category pages, game and session pages, peer comparison | Nothing |
| The tape and findings | All of it, with the captured evidence under every headline | Nothing |
| Analysis | All timeframes, automatic markup, operating zones, findings, trends, what changed | Manual indicators, drawing tools, custom limits, Compare, before and after, repeated experiments |
| Frame counter | On or off, with the default counter | Corner, fields, size and plate |
| Appearance | The Terminal theme and the Redline mark | Six colour themes, and seven finishes for the window, taskbar and tray |
| Assistant | None | The panel in the window and the tool server, against a model you supply |
Pro is one payment, once, on Steam. A licence that lapses leaves every reading, every page and every theme you already chose exactly where they were. History captured under a licence is never taken back: the span stops growing, it does not shrink.
Availability
The store page is in review. It goes up the day that comes back approved, and Steam handles the install, the updates and the community from there.