Pulse

A compact CPU / GPU / RAM dashboard for Windows. One exe, no installer, no account, no telemetry, no background service. Close the window and monitoring stops.

Download

Grab Pulse.exe from the latest release and double-click it. Nothing to install.

The exe is not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC" the first time. Click More info, then Run anyway. If you would rather not trust a random exe, build it yourself from source (two commands, below).

Works on Windows 10 and 11. GPU readings need an NVIDIA card with its driver installed. CPU and RAM work on any machine.

What it shows

• Three cards for CPU, GPU and RAM with the current percentage and a 60-second graph on a fixed 0 to 100% scale.
• CPU: clock, thread count, busiest core.
• GPU: name, temperature, power draw, VRAM used / total.
• RAM: used and available physical memory.
• A process table with name, PID, CPU % and resident RAM. Click a heading to sort. Type in the filter box to match by name or PID. Ctrl+F jumps to the filter.
• Refresh every 1, 2 or 5 seconds. Pause freezes the display while sampling keeps running, so resume shows fresh numbers. Space toggles pause.
• Keep on top pins the window. If you have more than one supported GPU, a selector appears.

Window size follows Windows display scaling.

Run from source

Install Python 3.10 or newer, then:

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
python main.py

Launch Pulse.bat does the same thing using a local venv if one exists.

Build the exe

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt pyinstaller
python -m PyInstaller --onefile --windowed --name Pulse --icon assets\pulse.ico --add-data "assets\pulse.ico;assets" main.py

The result lands in dist\Pulse.exe. build.bat runs the same command against the local venv.

Sensor notes

CPU and physical RAM come from psutil. Process CPU is normalized across all logical processors. Process RAM is resident memory in MiB, which can include shared pages. System RAM in use is total minus available. CPU clock is the value the OS reports, not a per-core clock. CPU temperature is not shown because Windows does not expose it consistently without extra drivers.

GPU utilization, VRAM, temperature and power come from the NVIDIA driver's nvidia-smi. AMD and Intel GPUs are not supported yet. If the driver is missing or a sensor is unavailable, the GPU card shows that and CPU / RAM keep going. GPU calls time out after three seconds, so a hung driver can slow polling. No administrator rights are needed.

Everything stays in memory. Tk updates happen only on the main thread. One sampling worker and a bounded queue stop polls from overlapping or piling up stale samples.

References: psutil, nvidia-smi.

Tests

python -m unittest discover -s tests
python tests\gui_smoke.py

The GUI test opens a window briefly and checks live readings, filtering, sorting, pause, refresh selection, minimum-size layout and worker shutdown.

Design

Concept mockups live in design/mockups. The app follows the charcoal and sage direction: waveform wordmark, numbered metric panels, labeled 0 to 100% graphs, compact header controls, striped process table.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.