A colored graph based on Distance to TjMax is a good idea in theory but even here there's a problem. The core voltage you are running and how much you are overclocking directly effects the stability of your computer at a given temperature.
My E6400 with a TjMax=85C is a good example. It is Prime/Orthos stable at:
3200 MHz - DTS = 5
3400 MHz - DTS = 15
3600 MHz - DTS = 25
The amount of head room a person has to leave to maintain stability varies with how hard they are pushing their processor. For my E6400, even when it is overclocked by 50%, it remains Orthos stable right up to the thermal throttling point just before TjMax.
http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/1...kinghotgq3.png
Orthos and CoreTemp misreport MHz so ignore them. TAT shows the thermal throttle was Active (aka. rev limiter :D ) yet Orthos continued to run without any problems and CPU-Z correctly reports that the CPU is still running at full speed. You need higher temps than this before the thermal throttle will drop the multi down to 6.0 and real throttling begins.
When running this same CPU at 3600 MHz, I can't get anywhere near this temperature while running Orthos without randomly rebooting or losing stability.
A colored bar graph is not going to solve anything. How can I tell a user in the above example that is running their E6400 at 3200MHz and their DTS=25 that they are near the "red zone". That will only scare a person from pushing farther even though they still have a huge amount of temperature head room and are well within the Intel spec. Like wise, how can I tell a person at 3600MHz that DTS=25 is a nice safe number when they have trouble running Orthos for any length of time whenever the room temperature goes up by 1C.
People are getting far too hung up on absolute temperatures and even Distance to TjMax. As long as you leave yourself some head room to TjMax so your processor isn't throttling and you're Prime stable, then there isn't any need to even monitor core temperatures. If Intel thought that your processor was going to blow up at high temperatures near TjMax then obviously they would lower TjMax to avoid warranty claims. Instead, Intel has raised TjMax by 10C for the new 45nm dual cores which to me is a pretty good sign that core temperature just isn't that big of an issue.