Stresstesting my PC

Drooling Guy · July 5, 2015

Let's say I just finished building my PC what are the programms that I should use to stresstest it, for how long should I run them and and what are some things(temp,...) I should look out for?

Thanks to any responses in advance:)

JoeCoke · July 5, 2015

Prime95 is a great way to go for CPUs, I'd test for at least a few hours.

For GPUs, any demanding game or benchmark should work, you can try Unigine Valley.

If you wanna test your memory use memtest86.

If your CPU gets over about 75c that's not very good.

I wouldn't let my GPU get over 80c.

Hope this helps.

xDanielxOossiex · July 5, 2015

What are your system specs? Just curious about it =)

Drooling Guy · July 5, 2015

What are your system specs? Just curious about it =)

i7 5820k

Asus gtx 970 turbo oc

Msi X99s sli plus

8 GB Crucial ballistix sport

Noctua nhu14s

xDanielxOossiex · July 5, 2015

i7 5820k

Asus gtx 970 turbo oc

Msi X99s sli plus

8 GB Crucial ballistix sport

Noctua nhu14s

Oh dear, another super pc

LogicalDrm · July 6, 2015

You don't really need to run any stress tests unless you really aim for OC. Just some basic benchmarks like Cinebench, Unigine and 3DMark should give you idea (score) of everything working. Plus running them with MSI Afterburner or another system monitor will show if your cooling is working.

E: I haven't run any since I changed mobo. Just checked that CPU cooler is seated properly and amped my last settings.

brandishwar · July 6, 2015

You don't really need to run any stress tests unless you really aim for OC. Just some basic benchmarks like Cinebench, Unigine and 3DMark should give you idea (score) of everything working. Plus running them with MSI Afterburner or another system monitor will show if your cooling is working.

E: I haven't run any since I changed mobo. Just checked that CPU cooler is seated properly and amped my last settings.

I concur in part. Stress testing can also reveal if you have any faulty hardware and tell you, before you start trying to play games and the like, whether your system can handle the kind of stresses you intend to use. While most benchmarks and stress tests are overkill, that's the intent. It's like seeing if a word processor can still run smoothly when you paste 50 copies of War and Peace into one document. No one is ever going to do that, but it could reveal problems that otherwise would be missed that could have real world impact.

Let's say I just finished building my PC what are the programms that I should use to stresstest it, for how long should I run them and and what are some things(temp,...) I should look out for?

Thanks to any responses in advance:)

Prime95 has already been recommended, but there are similar applications out there as well. Folding@Home also has a stress tester for the CPU, but Prime95 can stress things much more. For the graphics card, Unigine Valley or Unigine Heaven are the ones recommended most. I'd recommend the latter over the former since it appears to have a more dynamic use of the graphics engine compared to Valley. And for monitoring temperatures, CPU-Z HWMonitor.

And if you really want to check the stability of your system, run both Prime95 and Heaven simultaneously -- yes you can do this. This will tell you quite quickly how well your cooling works and how well your PSU can stand up to the stress you put on it.

iPhoenix · July 6, 2015

Prime95 is a great way to go for CPUs, I'd test for at least a few hours.

Please do not use Prime95 if you have a haswell, haswell-e, or later CPU. It uses a different instruction set that overvolts the CPU. This is old and dated thinking back when CPUs had much different architecture.

I use a combination of the following:

CPU - Intel Burn Test

RAM - LinX

GPU - Furmark

Another good contender (that Linus prefers)

Aida64