How do you test your new PC build to ensure all the new components are working as well as they could be? Did you build the system yourself or buy prebuilt? You have quite a few options really, this depends how hard you want to push your system and whether it is overclocked or not.
What you want to do is make sure that your system is working fine all the time, performing at its best no matter whether you are playing one of the latest game releases or streaming and gaming at the same time.
Even if your PC isn't new it could be a good idea to test your system and try to pinpoint any issues and discover how stable the PC really is.
There are many tools out there designed to stress-test the CPU, RAM and GPU.
The best place to start is with the CPU and RAM as these components are operating at a higher level more of the time than the GPU, once you are done testing these then we advise moving onto the GPU.
CPU & RAM Stress Testing CPU stress testing CPU stress testing is performed to check the performance of the processor while running at it's full speed and 100% load, this will maximise the thermal load on the CPU too, raising its temperature much higher than would normally be seen when gaming.
All of the cores of the chip will be getting used to ensure a thorough test.
We advise downloading a tool to monitor the temperatures, voltages and load in addition to the stress-testing tool itself.
We would suggest that the ideal maximum temperature for your CPU is 75°C, it can fluctuate a lot but the ideal 'average maximum' to observe should be around this.
RAM stress testing The memory (RAM) is quite a common first port of call if you are facing problems such as the 'blue-screen of death' or random system reboots, you might have underlying memory defects or behavioural issues.
If you overclock your system you might be pushing the RAM clock speed or voltage too much.
System Monitoring Tools As we mentioned above, we highly recommend monitoring your system while stress-testing; with a good tool you will be able to monitor everything from CPU temperature, to fan speeds, to clock speeds and voltage.
Below we have shared a few examples of what we like to use.
CPUID HWMonitor HWMonitor from CPUID is a simple interface with a huge amount of data connection to your system, it will give you real-time information on thermals, clock speeds and power usage to name a few.
What is nice about this tool are the 'value' columns which include the 'current value', 'min' and 'max' of the data you are looking at.
So say you haven't run any tests yet, this tool will be giving you a good idea of the idle maximums and the lowest value seen while idling.
When you then run the tests you will will able to track the maximums.
Download HWMonitor here You will see in the screenshot below some data from my PC which features the 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, the below screen grab shows all 24 threads and the % usage.
HWiNFO64 HWiNFO64 is another free tool like HWMonitor, it is quite advanced and has a customisable user interface.
You can monitor temperatures, clock speeds and voltages for all the major components such as the CPU, RAM and GPU, as well as other parameters on the Motherboard.
