CPU Stress Test
A CPU stress test is an important part of making sure any overclock you have made on your system is stable. This will make sure when you are working on an important spreadsheet, or on a rampage playing your favorite video game, you don't get a system crash or get interrupted.Conducting a CPU test is fairly straight forward. You will need a program that will load your CPU to it's maximum for a given length of time. If you are overclocking make sure you have a temperature monitor active on your system so you don't overheat your computer.
The program that I like to use when performing a CPU stress test is called Prime95.
You will need to open one version for every CPU core you have. Then select which test you would like to perform. Choose CPU and core 0. In the pull down you will see how many cores you have. Open up another version and continue to do the same thing for each core.
Once you have a screen full of Windows waiting to be tested, click the start on all of them and watch your computer stress. Make sure you monitor the heat of your CPU, typically 62 C or less is safe, for a CPU specific temperature list, you'll need to perform a search to the specific CPU you have.
When I do this step, I only let Prime95 run for 5 min. Typically this will find most errors. For a full stability check, make sure you run this for 4 hours or longer, personally, if you already encode video, I'll queue up 4 or 5, then let that run. That should give you between 4 and 10 hours of CPU intense work. Depending on the type of video and size of files of course.
TIP! Although to find out if an overclock is completely stable, it's a good idea to run it for at least 4 hours, running a stress test for 5 minutes will weed out most problems. We need to keep in mind a computer is very seldom at max workload for long periods of time.
Learn how to build your own computer
Subscribe
To
This Site's Feed
