How to see the Video Card Temperature (Nvidia, ATI, Intel...)

An alternative for nvidia cards is to use nvidia-smi: the "NVIDIA System Management Interface program".

user@box:~$ nvidia-smi -q -d temperature
GPU 0:
            Product Name            : GeForce 210
            PCI ID                  : a6510de
            Temperature             : 39 C

Or to output just the numeric value in Celsius:

user@box:~$ nvidia-smi --query-gpu=temperature.gpu --format=csv,noheader
39

Yes, there is a command.

Detecting sensors

First of all, you have to search for sensors:

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors
sudo sensors-detect

Since lucid lynx, you have to type:

sudo service module-init-tools start

If you're running another Ubuntu version type:

sudo /etc/init.d/module-init-tools start

To save the detection results.

Displaying sensor data

Now, to show the temperatures, type:

sensors

Now you should see something like that:

I don't have many sensors, btw :)

Displaying temperature of NVIDIA GPU

If you are using a NVIDIA GPU type:

sudo apt-get install nvclock

After installing it, type nvclock -T to display the temperature.

You can also type nvidia-settings -q gpucoretemp.

I hope this helped you,

The already mentioned command for nvidia (on my OpenElec installation):

nvidia-smi

also gave additional information:

+------------------------------------------------------+                       
| NVIDIA-SMI 3.295.71   Driver Version: 295.71         |                       
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| Nb.  Name                     | Bus Id        Disp.  | Volatile ECC SB / DB |
| Fan   Temp   Power Usage /Cap | Memory Usage         | GPU Util. Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
| 0.  GeForce GT 520            | 0000:01:00.0  N/A    |       N/A        N/A |
|  N/A   52 C  N/A   N/A /  N/A |  17%  169MB / 1023MB |  N/A      Default    |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------|
| Compute processes:                                               GPU Memory |
|  GPU  PID     Process name                                       Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|  0.           Not Supported                                                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+