### Phantasmic Help

## Preferences

#### General

Launch at Login
Phantasmic will start automatically when you login to your computer.

Windows are always in front
Forces Phantasmic windows to always be in the foreground.

Display temperature in Fahrenheit
When checked, the Fahrenheit temperature scale is used in all graphs and tables.

Enable controls while monitoring
When checked, you can change the thermal model, fan and temperature limits while in monitor mode. This enables you to see the deviation between the effect of system control and the model.

Menubar text colour indicates thermal state
When checked, the text colour of the menubar display will indicate the thermal state of your computer.

Tracking History (secs)
Controls the length of time data points are retained for display in the Tracking window.
Minimum: 1 second
Maximum: 86400 seconds (1 day)
Default: 300 seconds (5 minutes)

Temperature Graph History (secs)
Controls the length of time data points are retained for display in the Temperature window.
Minimum: 1 second
Maximum: 86400 seconds (1 day)
Default: 3600 seconds (1 hour)

RPM Graph History (secs)
Controls the length of time data points are retained for display in the RPM window.
Minimum: 1 second
Maximum: 86400 seconds (1 day)
Default: 3600 seconds (1 hour)

#### Fan Control

Phantasmic implements a PID controller to match the fan speed to that predicted by the chosen response graph. This implementation is based on Wikipedia PID_Controller

Controller Gain
Set the gain of the controller.

Integral Time
Adjusts the error value to compensate for the sum of all past errors, with the intention of completely eliminating them in T seconds.

Derivative Time
The derivative component attempts to predict the error value at T seconds in the future, assuming that the loop control remains unchanged.

Fan speed tolerance
Any change in speed below the set tolerance is ignored. This helps improve the software efficiency by reducing the number of calls to the IO system of your machine.

Temperature filter interval Temperature measurements of hardware compononents (especially the CPU) can be very “noisy” with significant fluctuations from their mean. By filtering these measurements, the fan speed can be adjusted more smoothly, rather than following every fluctuation.

#### Update

Controls for the Sparkle updater software to allow it to check automatically for new versions of Phantasmic, set the frequency of these checks or perform a manual check.

Copyright © 2018-2026 B.R. Christianson (bryan@whatroute.net)