What type of programs should I run after building a PC to test it?

[leglez]

Just built my first PC, what programs should I run to test it and check the performance out?

 

[leglez]

Bump

 

[mc866]

See here:


http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=28&threadid=1901991&enterthread=y

 

[KingofFah]

And then this.

No malice intended, just kidding.

 

[WildHorse]

Suggestion for testing, and IN THIS SEQUENCE:
(you will easily find each test available free on the web)

1st:
See if your motherboard brand has a web forum showing other peoples' troubleshooting and tweaking experiences. Study them~!!!

2nd:
Do a careful visual inspection of everything, every tiny component, every electrical connection, all wires around fans & heatsinks, etc.

3rd:
Run Memtest86+. Some motherboards include Memtest86+ already in the bios (DFI, perhaps other brands) If not, download it.
Some recommend that you set Memtest86+ to run ONLY tests 5 and then 8, for maybe 100 passes each. Then if that's error free, go ahead & run the entire gamut of tests for 100 or so passes.
If you get errors, then retry tests on just one stick of ram at a time.
When you see red errors you'll immediately think your RAM is defective, but in most cases the errors are really due to your ram timing and voltage settings in BIOS, to tweak later, a fine art.
Tweaking bios settings can take a lot of time, brute force trial & error figures into it a lot, with plenty of restarts, adjustments, restart again.
You can probably tweak some of your BIOS settings WHILE MEMTEST86+ is running.
If you do, then look to see if each tweak results in any RAM bandwidth increase or decrease, which you can read in real time as a number directly in the Memtest86+ test display while it's running. Achieve any increases that you can.

4th:
Then run OCCT! 30 minute torture test from France. This is the best quick predictor of how you may or may not pass the Prime 95 test.
Forget about SuperPi that you'll hear about, it's basically worthless because you can pass SuperPi but fail OCCT!. The whole idea here is to get a reading QUICKLY on whether or not you can pass Prime95. If you fail OCCT! you will certaintly fail Prime95 test. If you fail, that means you need to change your bios settings, e.g.; perhaps loosen the RAM timings a bit, change voltages a bit, to achieve more stability.

5th:
The BIG TRUE RELIABLE STABILITY TEST is Prime95.
There's a nice GUI version of it called SP2004 that gives you a little bit better info, but if you plan to report your Prime95 test results to anyone else, such as on an overclocker web site, they may not accept the SP2004 version, which is the version that I much prefer, & recommend.

Your goal: To run Prime95 (or Prime 95 dressed up as SP2004) for 24 hours with no errors. SUccess means you can run your rig like crazy, stress it with major game play, etc. without any crashing or other problems. It means your computer is STABLE.

6th:
After that, you go into video card testing.
Lots of differing ideas float around about gpu testing.
A test result doesn't mean anything until you compare it to someone else's for a similar computer.
I usually rely on running 3DMARK 01, 03, 05 and 06 tests, then compare my resulting scores to scores for similar rigs as posted on some overclockers' web sites.
You'll see reference to Aquamark which is an old test that's been defunct for more than a year, and several other brands of video tests.
Again, opinions on what constitutes a good video card test are all over the map.

I've had outstanding overclocking success with the above testing procedure.


EDIT: I just want to add: Monitor your temperatures of CPU, chipset, etc. during all testing!!!!!

 

[mAdMaLuDaWg]

Originally posted by: KingofFah
And then this.

No malice intended, just kidding.

ROFL. :thumbsup:

 

[uberman]

I did not respond to this post originally because I did not want to reccomend programs to stress your computer. I don't want you to have problems. I have used such programs in the past to make some intermittent problem show up so that it could be fixed.

I have an old version of SiSoft Sandra which has a burn-in wizard to stress your computer. I have not used that function before, why create a problem that I don't have?

It used to be a nice program. I don't know how the new release is.

 

[KingofFah]

How does it create a problem? Using tests that stress the PC expose problems you might otherwise not detect. An instability is an instability, regardless of whether you notice it in normal day-to-day stuff.

 

[uberman]

Originally posted by: KingofFah
How does it create a problem? Using tests that stress the PC expose problems you might otherwise not detect. An instability is an instability, regardless of whether you notice it in normal day-to-day stuff.

If you have a machine that will perform fine under normal use, it doesn't make sense to torture test it to see if you can make parts overheat and fail.

 

[John]

Originally posted by: uberman

Originally posted by: KingofFah
How does it create a problem? Using tests that stress the PC expose problems you might otherwise not detect. An instability is an instability, regardless of whether you notice it in normal day-to-day stuff.

If you have a machine that will perform fine under normal use, it doesn't make sense to torture test it to see if you can make parts overheat and fail.

How many people on an enthusiast forum are "normal" users? Not to mention the distributing computing folks where a stable rig is essential. If you build your rig properly then stressing is not going to overheat anything, and detecting component failure before it happens is the smart thing to do. Not to mention if you have a flaky stick of memory it can lead to software issues so running a stress test like Memtest86+ is part of the troubleshooting process. 🙂

Honestly if you're a hardcore gamer then you're creating as much heat as you would running stress testing applications.