Keeping tabs on temperature in Mac OS X

I believe that it is in good practice to keep an eye on your systems temperature, especially if you start noticing oddities with you computer. Recently I was experiencing hangs on my iMac and found smcFanControl which allows me to keep tabs on my iMac's temperatures.

Now that I knew at what temperature my machine was running at I need to figure out what can be considered normal operating temperature. After some Google magic I was able to find the Intel Mac Temperature Database which has temperatures for most Intel based Apple computers. The site is mostly crowsourced, but with a wealth of information.

Once you have an understanding as to what is considered an average temperature on you computer, you can now use smcFanControl to step up the RPM's on the systems fans to bring down the temperature to somewhat match what you find in the database.

I had to bump up my CPU and ODD (Optical Disk Drive) fans by 200 rpm each.