PWR
Power stock rockets 337 W as Aliens: Dark Descent opens
19h ago
Coming to Steam
The beauty of charting software,
The beauty of charting software,
applied to your system.
A recorder listens to your hardware and writes down sixty-six data points every second. The processor, the graphics card, memory, drives, the network and the wall socket. Then it hands them to a charting terminal built with the same rigour as the software traders read markets on.
The recorder
Sixty-six readings a second,
Sixty-six readings a second,
and it never interrupts you.
One service, a tenth of one per cent of the processor, twelve megabytes a day. It starts with Windows, eases off when the machine is idle, and comes back the instant anything happens. Nothing it writes down leaves the disk it was written to.
Templates
Eight pages, already built.
Eight pages, already built.
Then build your own.
Every part of the machine arrives with a page laid out for it, and one window of settings behind them all. Rename them, rearrange them, keep a copy, or start from a blank page and put only what you care about on it.
Instruments
The instruments traders read markets with,
The instruments traders read markets with,
pointed at your hardware.
Normal ranges, moving averages, change points and correlations, drawn over your own readings rather than over a price. Add them by hand, or let the markup layer put them on every eligible chart at once.
Games
A frame counter that reads the frames,
A frame counter that reads the frames,
not the game.
Nothing is injected and nothing is hooked, so no anti-cheat has anything to object to. The session is graded afterwards against a ladder, and held up against the night before it.
Pro
Free captures everything.
Free captures everything.
Pro remembers it.
Every tick, every page and every automatic explanation are free, and so are your last two months. Pro buys a memory that goes back years, a model you can ask about your own machine, and the tools for marking up your own charts.
- Tick rate
- 1 Hz
- Data points per tick
- 66
- Ticks a day
- 86,400
- A day of capture
- 12 MB
- Recorder CPU
- 0.1 %
- Base edition
- Free
Four pages of the same machine. Click to bring one forward.
Overview
Two things that had never been put together.
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. Almost none of that depends on the numbers being prices.
SystemChart wires that craft to a recorder sitting on your own hardware. One tick a second, sixty-six data points on every tick, kept at full resolution for as long as you want them. Nothing averaged away, nothing rolled up into a summary of a summary.
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.
With the window put away, the recorder is the tenth of a per cent Task Manager shows against it, because reading counters Windows already keeps is the whole cost. Open the window and you are paying for a window, which is a bill you stop the moment you close it.
One tick rate, not a decision
A reading a second. Idle, it eases to every five seconds and comes straight back the moment anything happens. Games and a busy machine always get the full rate. There is nothing here to tune.
How far back it reaches
Two months free, at the full tick, with nothing averaged down. With a licence, each size 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.
Every tick
What gets written down.
Sixty-six data points about the machine itself, plus a set for every drive volume, every application and 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.
Processor 17
- load.avg / min / max
- freq.ghz
- cores.busy, cores.p, cores.e
- time.kernel, time.user
- time.dpc, time.interrupt
- ctxsw, queue, threads
Graphics 20
- load.avg, mem.ctrl.pct
- temp.c, room.c, thermal.cw
- power.w, power.pct, power.limit.w
- clock.core, clock.mem
- fan.pct
- vram.mb, vram.pct
- nvenc.pct, nvdec.pct
- pcie.rx.mbps, pcie.tx.mbps
- throttle.any, .power, .thermal
Memory 8
- used.gb, commit.gb
- cache.gb
- faults, hardfaults
- pool.paged.gb
- pool.nonpaged.gb
Drives 7
- load.avg
- read.mbps, write.mbps
- latency.ms
- iops, queue
- temp.c every ten seconds
- free space per volume
Network 8
- rx.mbps, tx.mbps
- util.pct, link.mbps
- packets
- errors, discards
Power 6
- watts.cpu, watts.gpu
- watts.platform
- watts.psu
- load.avg at the wall
- cost at your tariff
Per application
- cpu.pct
- mem.mb
- io.mbps
- vram.mb
Per game
- fps.avg, fps.low
- frametime.ms
- frametime.worst
- gpu.busy
- stutter.pct
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.
The one number this does not have
Your processor's temperature lives in a register only kernel code can read. Every program that shows you one ships a driver to get at it, and shipping a driver for a single reading is a cost this application declines to pay: it would want a hardware signing certificate, an attestation pass, a review by Steam, and a permanent argument with anti-cheat, in exchange for one line on one page.
Other tools show you one by shipping that driver. SystemChart could read what they publish while they run, and briefly did. It was taken back out: a reading that only appears while somebody else's program happens to be open, and has to be credited to it everywhere, is really a question about what else you have installed. Better to have no processor temperature and say so.
There is a number Windows will hand anybody without a driver, and it is a trap. On the machine this site was built on it read 27.9 degrees and did not move by a tenth through seventy seconds of all twenty-four cores at a hundred per cent. It is not charted here, because a reading that never changes would be charted, compared and believed.
Your graphics card and your drives report their own temperatures without any of this, and both are charted. It is the processor, specifically, that is behind a door this application will not open.
Cost tracker
What your machine costs to run.
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.
1
Find the rate on your bill
One number, in pence or cents per kilowatt hour. It is on every statement, usually beside the standing charge.
2
Put it into Settings
Running cost takes the tariff and your processor's rated power. Nothing else is needed and nothing is sent anywhere.
3
Read the meter
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.
Where the watts go
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.
One number, once
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.
The pages
Eight pages, already built.
There is nothing to assemble before the application is useful. Every page below is there the first time you open it, laid out by somebody who knew what that part of a machine does and which of its readings belong beside each other.
They are ordinary pages, not a locked template. Any of them can be copied, rearranged, added to or thrown away, and the original is always one click back. Flip through them here.
Overview
The whole machine on one screen. A composite of processor, graphics, memory and drive load reading as a single market, with the tape of headlines above it and a ticker of every part beside it.
Reads the composite index, every part's current figure and its move, what is running right now, and the last few things worth telling you about.
Processor
Load with its own normal range drawn behind it, so a busy afternoon is visibly busy rather than merely high. Kernel and user time are split apart, because work the machine is doing on its own behalf is a different problem from work you asked for.
Tracks load average, minimum and maximum, clock speed, busy cores split across performance and efficiency, kernel, user, deferred procedure call and interrupt time, context switches, queue length and thread count.
Graphics
Temperature is charted against the room it is sitting in, which turns a hot card into either a cooling problem or a hot afternoon. Power is charted against the card's own limit rather than against a round number, so pinned means pinned.
Tracks load, memory controller load, temperature, room temperature and the difference, board power against its limit, core and memory clocks, fan, video memory used and its share, the encoder and decoder engines, bus traffic both ways, and whether the card says it is throttling and for which reason.
Memory
In use and committed are drawn together, because the gap between them is the question. Hard faults get their own chart: they are the reading that turns "plenty free" into an explanation of why everything felt slow anyway.
Tracks memory in use, commit charge, the file cache, soft and hard page faults, and paged and non-paged pool.
Drives
Throughput is the reading everybody looks at and latency is the one that explains the day. A drive can be moving very little and still be the reason nothing responds, which is only visible with both on the page.
Tracks load, megabytes read and written a second, latency, operations a second, queue depth, drive temperature every ten seconds, and free space on every volume.
Network
Traffic is charted against the link it is actually running at, so a saturated adapter looks saturated rather than looking like a large number. Errors and discards sit underneath, where a cable going bad shows up long before anything disconnects.
Tracks received and sent, utilisation as a share of the link, the link rate itself, packet counts, errors and discards.
Power
Watts at the wall, broken into where they went. Enter the unit rate off your electricity bill once and the same chart is also a price, per hour, per session and per game.
Tracks processor, graphics and platform watts, the estimated draw at the wall and at the supply, load, and the cost at your own tariff.
Capture
The recorder looking at itself. How many readings are held, how far back they reach, what they weigh on disk and how fast they are arriving, so the span you can ask about is never a guess.
Tracks readings held, the oldest one, size on disk, the measured daily rate, how much of the budget is used, and any break in the record.
Settings
One window, eight panels, no account.
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. How far back to keep, and which corner the frame counter sits in, are the two that actually matter on day one.
Walk through all eight
Capture, History, Frame counter, Appearance, Running cost, Agent, Report a problem, About.
Capture
The recorder runs at 1 Hz and eases to a tick every five seconds when the machine is idle, returning the moment anything happens. Games and anything over 25 per cent load always get the full rate, so a session is never sampled thinly. There is nothing to choose.
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 12 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.
Report a problem
One button gathers component logs, versions, what your hardware can report and the health of the archive. It leaves out your readings, the process lists it captured, your history, your sessions and your licence. You approve it before anything is sent.
You get back a code like SC-AB12CD34EF. Email that with a sentence about what you were doing and the report can be found. They are deleted after fourteen days. If the window will not open at all there is a separate Support Reporter in the Start menu that sends the same thing without loading the charts.
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.
The instruments
Charts built for signals.
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 source reading rather than to a summarised average.
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.
Read against something
A line on its own is just a shape. Shaded zones show where a reading left its normal range. Fixed lines mark the limits that mean something on any machine, like 80 degrees. Hours the machine was off are drawn as a gap, not as a slow ramp overnight.
Ask how often, not just how much
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
Draw the studies yourself.
Six studies, not a hundred. The ones that made it measure level, trend, spread or a limit, which is what any signal has. The rest were built for prices and a crowd, and your machine has neither.
Put any of them on any line, on any page, with your own period, your own colour and your own thresholds.
GPU
30 minutes of Counter-Strike 2
Chart note
Is my card running too hot when I play? No, and not close. Over half an hour it averaged 73 per cent load and 360 watts, while the core sat at 60.8 degrees against a limit of 80. The fan never went past 57 per cent.
The part worth knowing is the fan. It answers a change in temperature about 26 seconds late, so a short burst is over before it has spun up. That is normal for a fan curve, and it is why a quick spike heats a card more than you would expect.
Frames held 237 average. There was one hitch, a single second where the frame rate dropped and the stutter measure jumped together. One second, not a pattern.
Measured on the author's machine, Saturday 29 August. 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 explains itself
Each one carries a line saying what it measures, so you can pick without looking anything up. The foot of the menu says which studies are deliberately absent, and why.
Or let it mark up the page for you
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
Real news headlines, straight from your machine.
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
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.
While you play
A frame counter, not an injected hook.
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.
Pro After you play
The chart an average cannot be.
Two evenings both averaging 140 frames are the same number and a different night. One of them held steady the whole way. The other spent a fifth of itself in the twenties and made the average back up somewhere nobody was looking. The average is the one figure that hides exactly the thing you felt.
So the session gets drawn against the ladder instead. Seven bands, from Struggling to Machine God, and the area under the trace is filled with whichever one it was in at that moment. Underneath, the same run with time taken out of it: how much of the evening was spent where.
Then hold another night against it. Runs are lined up by offset from their own start rather than by the clock, because they happened on different evenings and the question is how they compare minute for minute.
The same colours you saw while playing
The bands and the seven rungs beside them are the ones from the counter over the game. Somebody who has watched Cruising sit in the corner all evening already knows what the purple means here without reading a word of it.
Graded the way the counter graded it
A run resting on a threshold is not counted in two bands at once. The same hysteresis the badge uses is applied to the history, so what this counts is what would actually have been on screen.
Free keeps the measurements
Every frame is captured and charted without a licence, and the session page keeps its frame rate, its lows, its worst frames and its verdict. Pro adds the ladder those numbers are read against, and holding one evening up to another in it.
Pro
Free captures everything. Pro remembers it.
Every tick, every page and every automatic explanation are free, and so are your last two months.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, including anything a watch caught | Writing watches of your own |
| 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 | The counter, its corner and its size | The ranked badge, the machine readings under it, and the session graded against the ladder afterwards |
| Appearance | Every finish for the window, taskbar and tray, and the Terminal theme | Six colour themes |
| 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.
Assistant
Let an agent query SystemChart for answers.
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.
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.
In the window, or in your own assistant
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.
Answers you can check
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?
brief
show_page
set_timeframe
Probably not much was wrong.
Over the last 12 hours, the charts show:
- CPU load averaged 12.7% and peaked at 75.5%; it was rising a little.
- RAM used averaged 46.4% and was also slowly rising.
- SSD latency stayed very low at 0.12 ms on average.
- GPU load averaged 9.95% and was flat.
- Wall power averaged 182 W and was flat.
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?
show_page
set_timeframe
changepoint
describe
describe
correlate
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:
- GPU load over the last 12h ranged from 0 to 100, with a median of 7 and a 95th percentile of 30.575.
- That means it was usually light, with some bursts.
Did it get hot enough to matter?
- GPU temperature over the last 12h had a mean of 43.385 °C, median 43 °C, and maximum 66.75 °C.
- That’s warm, but nothing in the readings says it was unusually hot for this machine.
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?
applications
machine
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:
- CPU: Intel Core Ultra 9 285K
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090
- 24 cores / 24 threads
Other notable users were:
- RocketLeague: 9.42%
- testhost: 4.94%
- Code: 4.47%
- chrome: 3.73%
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 only read. The four that change something change what is on screen and stop there.
Summarise
- brief
- describe
- machine
- capabilities
- capture_status
Measure
- correlate
- regress
- changepoint
- trends
- changed
Look up
- history
- composition
- applications
- games
- sessions
- events
Change the view
- show_page
- set_timeframe
- add_study
- set_markup
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, so an instruction smuggled into a window title earns you a wrong answer and no wrong actions. The panel and the tool server offer the same twenty, compared against each other on every build after they drifted apart once.
Availability
Coming soon to Steam.
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.
Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
Free edition keeps your last two months
Works offline. No account to make