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The 6 Best Free Programs for Stress Testing Your PC

James
21st Dec 2015

Build complete, but can it handle the stress?

Very few things in life are more satisfying than assembling all the parts to a new PC,
hitting the power button, and watching it boot up properly.
But even if your build starts up and seems to work without problems, you might want
to make sure all the components are fully functional. Does your graphics card pump
out pretty pictures at the level promised by the manufacturer? Does your RAM
operate consistently for hours on end? Does your CPU process the desired number of
ones and zeroes under intense loads without overheating?

To answer these questions, we turn to stress testing: Making sure that all of your parts
can handle the work that theyre designed to do (or overclocked to do). They might be
fine under normal use, but you want to know that theyll be able to handle heavier
tasks down the road, such as high-end gaming or media editing.
With stress testing, we simulate a heavy processing load on the entire computer or a
particular component in order to identify potential weak points, faulty hardware, or a
need for better cooling.

Before you begin

Stress testing is done with specific testing software. And the whole point of this
article is to recommend software, so well get to that in a second. First, some advice
before getting started:

For best results, you want your PC to focus all of its energy on the tests. Close
all non-essential programs.
Stress testing is usually done over long periods of time. Make sure to adjust
your power settings to disable sleep mode before you start testing.
Stress testing can be potentially dangerous for your components. Most
components are designed to shut off before incurring damage, but its better to
be safe than sorry. We recommend getting some type of hardware monitor
software, such as HWMonitor, to keep tabs on temperatures.
Once you have hardware monitoring software, look up the maximum
temperatures for your CPU and GPU. Most CPUs should not exceed 70
degrees C, and most GPUs should not exceed 100 degrees C. If your
components surpass their maximum heat, or stay close to the maximum for
extended periods, stop the stress test.

With that out of the way, lets look at some of the best software for torturing your PC:

CPU testing
Prime95: The most popular free software for testing CPUs. It will run indefinitely,
and shut off if it finds a problem. Its recommended to run Prime95 for at least 3
hours, and to make sure temperatures dont get too dangerous while youre testing.
[Instructions for using Prime95 see below]

Prime95 - Stress Test Your CPU

Information
Prime95 is a freeware program originally designed to find new Mersenne prime
numbers. Given the nature of Prime95 it is now widely used as a CPU stress testing
utility to gauge the stability of a CPU, especially when overclocking a system. It
includes a Torture Test designed specifically to test PC subsystems for errors.
Prime95's stress test feature can be configured to test various system components by
changing the FFT size. There are three pre-set configurations available:

Small FFTs (Primarily tests FPU and CPU caches)

In-Place FFTs (Maximum power consumption; tests FPU and CPU caches,
some RAM)
Blend (Tests everything including RAM)

On a completely stable system Prime95 will run indefinitely. If an error occurs the
stress test will terminate indicating the system may be unstable.
Warning
While running Prime95 your CPU will become incredibly hot, it is imperative that
you keep a constant watch of your CPU temperature with a system monitoring utility
such as Speccy, Speedfan or HWMonitor. If your CPU temperature does reach
dangerous levels stop the Prime95 stress test to prevent inflicting damage on your
CPU.
Note
Run Prime95 for up to three hours, unless errors occur sooner. Depending on
temperatures feel fee to run the test for longer to thoroughly test overclock or system
stability

Here's how:
1: Download the relevant version of Prime95 for your system.
2: Extract the zipped folder.
3: Open the extracted folder and click on the prime95.exe.

4: When Prime95 launches click on the Just Stress Testing button.

5: Select Small FFTs (or whichever specific test you've been asked to perform if
different). Click OK to start the test.

6: A Worker thread will open for each Logical CPU, these threads will update
information about every Logical CPU being tested.

Information
If one or more threads fail the Worker/s will stop and you will see the following
message in the relevant thread/s
Code:
FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.XXXX, expected less than 0.XXXX
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file

7: To stop the test at any time click on Test then Stop... from the resulting context
menu.

8: If the test runs without detecting any errors the results will look similar to the
results shown in the screenshot below.

That's it !

IntelBurnTest: Another popular option for testing CPUs. IntelBurnTest uses the
same stress-testing engine that Intel uses internally for quality control before shipping
out CPUs. The program also claims to perform the necessary tests in 8 minutes, as
opposed to 3+ hours with Prime95.
For a slightly more obscure option, theres also Super PI, a single-threaded
benchmark that calculates the number pi up to a specified number of digits (with a
maximum of 32 million). Its not the ideal stress test for multi-core CPUs, but it can
still give you a good idea of how your PC will handle single-threaded tasks. Its also
not a bad frame of reference for PC gaming performance.

GPU testing
FurMark: An extremely popular graphics stress test. This program should push your
graphics card harder than even the most demanding game on the market. If your
GPU has problems, you should know within about 15 minutes.
Unigines Valley: Another popular GPU stress test. This test renders out an
extremely detailed nature scene to see how much your graphics card can handle.

Unigines Valley stress test

RAM testing
MemTest86: The definitive RAM test. Boots from a USB drive or CD/DVD to test
everything about your RAM. If something turns red, thats bad. Otherwise, youre
good.
And thats it. What stress testing programs have you found to be the most useful? Did
we miss anything? Let us know in the comments, and good luck torturing your PC.

If youre looking for help building the PC that youll eventually torture with these
stress tests, check out our latest custom PC build recommendations on our homepage
at logicalincrements.com.

4 comments

notre_reine 2 months ago

i tried using furmark stresstest, in 1 minute i seen gpu temp raise from 60c to
104c and my laptop going shutdown. is it my gpu no longer can play any
games? or something wrong about thermal application? yesterday i saw
technician replaced thermal paste with thermal pad on my gpu chipset. is it
thermal pad is bad for gpu? before this i used thermal paste instead of thermal
pad

Orion Mod notre_reine 2 months ago

You are correct, the problem likely comes from the thermal pad. Thermal pads
do not have nearly as good thermal conductivity as correctly applied thermal
paste. Laptops already have a hard time staying cool enough, even when
everything is put together right.
I would take your laptop back to that technician and have him do the job
correctly, with good thermal paste. Otherwise your GPU is likely to overheat
even under less demanding conditions than Furmark.

Matthew Zehner Mod notre_reine 2 months ago

Your computer is shutting down because 104C is extremely dangerous for the
component. Your GPU should be at maximum 80C, and going about that can cause
hardware failure. Your computer is likely shutting off as a protective measure. You
should still be able to play games, Furmark is just extremely demanding.

Brandon 9 months ago

Thanks James! Excellent resources.