For the purpose of ensuring that your overclock is stable, checking that your cooling system is strong enough, or running in any fresh heat paste that you have put to your processor, stress testing your central processing unit (CPU) is an excellent method. On the other hand, there are a variety of methods by which you may do this, ranging from just playing a few games over a long length of time to running a stress testing program that is similar to a power virus.
If you want to be sure that your central processing unit is prepared for whatever you can throw at it, here is the best approach to stress test it.
A word of caution is in order
Before we begin the process of stress-testing your central processing unit (CPU), it is essential to keep in mind that this procedure is intended to put considerable strain on your processor. However, unless you are continually transcoding video or writing difficult code, it is quite unlikely that it will suffer this type of strain in its day-to-day functioning. Because of this, the CPU may be pushed above the power restrictions that were specified by the manufacturer.
If you do these tests for an hour or two, it is totally OK; but, if you run them for longer periods of time, it may shorten the lifetime of your central processing unit (CPU), which can lead to thermal throttling and a hard reboot if your cooling system is unable to keep up with the demands of the CPU.
When you are doing any type of stress test, you need to make sure that your cooling system is sufficient for the task at hand, that your personal computer is clean and not clogged with dust, and that you are able to check the temperature of your CPU at all times to ensure that it is not being overworked.
Performing a stress test on your central processing unit
Although there are a variety of good apps for testing the CPU’s stress, we find that OCCT is our favorite because of its specificity, choices, and consistent updates. If you go to the official website, you will be able to download it. Among the alternatives are the time-honored Prime95, Cinebench 2024, which is more focused on benchmarking, and AIDA64 respectively.
Download OCCT from the official website, and then launch the program when it has been downloaded.
In the second step, you will be shown the typical benchmarking screen before continuing. If you want to conduct benchmark tests to obtain some concrete data on how well your CPU is doing, you should stay there for a bit and experiment with the parameters to achieve the result you want.
However, if you wish to put your central processing unit through a stress test, pick Stability Test from the option on the left.
The third step is to use the normal settings to perform a successful stress test on your central processing unit (CPU), while also searching for any flaws and difficulties with the setup of your CPU. To do the most basic stress test possible, which simulates a real-world, day-to-day usage scenario (although a hard one), just leave everything in its current state.
4. To begin, press the green button labeled “Start.” After that, wait for the Patreon advertisement to end for ten seconds (or subscribe to the OCCT Patreon page so that you may avoid it in the future), and then when you are ready, click the green Start button.
Step 5: To monitor temperatures and power consumption, you may either use the monitoring screen that appears or your own third-party CPU monitoring program with the help of the monitoring screen. You ought to see a significant rise in both, and the cores of your central processing unit ought to load efficiently, depending on the selections you choose in the stress test settings.
However, if you are confident in the cooling capabilities of your processor and system and want to test how well your setup performs under a more demanding load, you will need to change the data set to “Small” so that it only targets the central processing unit (CPU). This will ensure that your memory is not stressed while your processor operates at a higher power draw and, consequently, a higher temperature.
The test mode may also be set to Extreme, which will result in an increased power drain. Either you may use a “Steady” Load Type to guarantee that the CPU redlines and remains there for the length of the test, or you can use a Variable Load Type to have the CPU use spike up and down in a manner that is more similar to how it would be used in the real world.
If you have a specific instruction set that you wish to test, choose it from the drop-down option; otherwise, you should leave it set to Auto. If you want to simulate a workload that is more multi-threaded, you may opt to fix the thread cycling on all cores. Alternatively, you can select to have it target particular cores in order to maximize their frequency. This will allow you to concentrate on single-threaded stability.
Move on to the sixth step, which is to let the test continue for as long as you believe is required to guarantee stability. The time it takes to determine whether or not your stock system is stable or if it requires improved cooling may be as little as fifteen minutes. This is particularly true if you are employing a more harsh test that is not representative of how the system would be used in the real world. Leaving your overclock running for an hour or even longer is something you should consider doing if you are interested in determining whether or not it is stable after a significant amount of fine-tuning.
Your cooling system may not be efficient enough to prevent thermal throttling if you see that the temperatures of your central processing unit (CPU) go into the nineties and that your clock speed decreases. When your computer freezes or crashes, you may need to reduce the voltage of your central processing unit (CPU) or enhance your cooling system in order to prevent this from happening again in the future.
Engage in some games
Playing games is still the finest method to put your central processing unit (CPU) through its paces, especially if you want to stress-test it. Despite the fact that there are a number of benchmarks that you can run, such as the suite of tests that 3DMark offers, and that many games have their own built-in benchmarks for performance testing, these benchmarks will never be able to achieve the same level of performance as genuine games since they do not include you directing them.
For the purpose of stress-testing a central processing unit (CPU) in games, it is possible that you would like to play at lower resolutions, where the game is more CPU bound than visually confined. However, in fact, just playing a game that you intend to play for a few hours without interruption at your regular settings will place a significant amount of stress on a CPU. Maintain a close check on use, clock speeds, temperatures, and power consumption during the whole process by using OCCT or your choice third-party monitoring tool, and see how well it performs. This is similar to how stress testing apps are performed.
Are you interested in testing the speed of your central processing unit (CPU) now that you know it is resistant to stress? In order to get the most out of your central processing unit (CPU), here is how to overclock it.
