When you stress test your CPU, you are able to size up your hardware’s intelligence and reliability. Maybe you need to overclock your processor for a little additional boost? Ultimately, the performance of your PC depends on how fast the processor is so that it can easily fulfill the most demanding tasks.
The following tools are useful in stress testing your CPU. Before you begin, you need to know that these tests at peak load can cause overheating of your computer.
1. HeavyLoad
True to its name, HeavyLoad by Jam Software can subject your computer to an extremely high stress. When it is running at full capacity, you will have a better grip of your computer’s other fading resources such as RAM.
Try working with different applications, programs and browsers at the same time. You will quickly know the ones you shouldn’t be using when there are too many windows open.
2. AIDA64 Extreme
AIDA64 is a very powerful tool which is compatible with all Microsoft systems ranging from 95/98 to Windows Server 2016. It can perform a granular analysis that takes into account multi-threaded memory and cache benchmarks.
The software has additional tests for voltage, fan speeds, temperature and more. It’s a complete diagnostic tool.
3. Stress-Ng
Linux users can depend on this reliable tool to perform the same load tests on their favorite distribution. The CPU-specific stress tests include floating point, integer, bit manipulation and control flow.
For Debian, a Stress-ng installation command goes like:
sudo apt-get install stress-ng
With Stress-ng, you can specify CPU method, timeout and the number of operations to be supported.
stress-ng --cpu 8--io 2 --timeout 30s --metrics
Complete manual details are available at this link.
4. Geekbench 4 (Mac)
Much like the Windows Task Bar, Mac offers an Activity Monitor that provides a complete table of all the existing CPU processes. But for a stress test, you must download an external app called Geekbench 4. It performs a variety of load tests for you.
5. CPUX
Don’t fancy downloading any software? CPUX will give you a robust stress test and also show where your system ranks among other. If you enter the maximum number of threads (“64”) and run this thing at its highest power (“100%”), your PC might face a few “issues” that will take more than a couple of reboots to fix. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
6. Overclock Checking Tool
This Windows software is very popular for CPU and a variety of tests since 2003. True to its name, it tests overclocking among other tests. Instead of combining all results into one, each test is done separately.
7. Prime95
Another classic, this software has been available for stress testing since 1995. Prime95 covers an entire range of operating systems including Windows, Linux, Mac and FreeBSD. The workload is verifiable and the results are outstanding.
8. Novabench
Novabench is a standardized tool that IT teams in large companies often use to perform a variety of heavy load CPU tests. It gives the results in minutes.
Summary
Many online diagnostic tools perform a stress test on not only CPU but also RAM, graphics cards and GPU. Such combined results fail to give an accurate picture. The only question you need an answer to is how much “load” your PC can take without overheating.
Which CPU stress test tools do you recommend? Please share your ideas in the comments.
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