Like all utilities designed to stress test your components, they push things to their limits for sustained periods. Limits that you’re unlikely experience in normal usage. Yet if your rig can cope with these torture tests then you’ll at least have the measured knowledge that your cooling set up is adequately covered with some headroom for some potential overclocking fun?
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FurMark will send your stock GPU cooler into a veritable frenzy, and a good 10-15+ degrees more toasty than normal gaming conditions. It’s the perfect test after making clock frequency adjustments to check stability. FurMark records temps throughout so you can watch in horror as the temps soar with your bog standard stock cooler!
GPU-Z monitors GPU specs, clock speed and temps. While running it registers minimum, average and maximum readings. In a practical setting have GPU-Z going while playing games to keep an eye on temps.
Besides being a commonly used standard for comparing GPU performance in reviews, Heaven is a useful test for cooler capability, and overclocking stability. The benchmark renders a series of short complex scenes that only top-end graphics cards have a chance of smooth performance. Any visual glitches may indicate heat problems or clock frequencies set above their tolerance.
HeavyLoad is a reliable all-round torture test for your CPU, GPU, RAM and main OS drive. Just select the component combination and hit the play button. HeavyLoad charts the activity through a visual graph for reference.
This is neatly presented hardware monitoring solution. HWMonitor reads and relays the data from all hardware sensors it can find. CPU, GPU, fans, and storage. Hardware is presented in a collapsible treeview so you can focus on just what you want too.
The deceptive title doesn’t refer to the processor support type, but rather the origin of the algorithms adopted in the software. IntelBurnTest is based on the same library used to benchmark super computers. And on paper makes this the ultimate CPU cooler test, with a plain warning that IntelBurnTest can make your CPU run up to 22 degrees hotter than Prime95.
Open Hardware Monitor is HWMonitor with a few more hardware readouts for you review including current component clock speeds, plus RAM usage and remaining storage space.
A popular stress testing utility among overclockers which features a special ‘Torture Test’ mode developed to push the CPU to it’s limit. It claims if you can run Prime95 for 24 hours without any errors, then you’ve got a stable rig. Though it’s not something we’d recommend running for such a sustained length of time. Stress testing your CPU is like flooring the accerarotor on your car. And in the same fashion adds wear and tear to the hardware while wasting quite a few watts in the proccess.
System Stability Tester utilises the tried and tested method of making your PC calculate Pi in order max out your CPU cores and send those temps soaring. Any errors picked up during the test are recorded providing a guide on system stability.
This a less sophisticated alternative to FurMark. Video Card Stability Test will happily send your GPU to 100% activity and includes it’s own benchmark, though it doesn’t monitor temps.
Posted on Monday, August 6th, 2012 at 6:20 am under Web Packs. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: cooling, heat sinks, hot, stress testing, torture test, web packs
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