why would anyone run an app that is specifically designed to crash their
computer that's a good question and I have some
pretty good answers stress testing applications can make your computer
overheat or even outright crash but in
doing so they can also reveal weak points in your system that could have
led to bigger problems like instability or even data loss but of all the options
out there for CPU stress or burn applications which one is actually going
to hit your CPU the hardest the answer spoiler alert is prime95
at least in terms of heat but the whole story is a lot more complicated than
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testing is an important part of Savvy PC shopping and maintenance but let's say
you've never done it before you head on over to Google Smash in some keywords
and oh that's a lot of options you got
your blender cinebench R20 and cinebench R23 occt prime95 CPU expert heavy load
Linux Intel XT ryzen Master Intel princess 64 Lin pack extreme
and that's all just for the CPU the
unfortunate reality is that there is no Silver Bullet best test and depending on
your Hardware software and what you're trying to accomplish you could end up
with completely different answers so yeah we spoiled the conclusion prime95
runs the hottest but even then which of the five tests 10 if you include the
avx2 checkbox should you run to find out we built up two identical
PCS with just two differences motherboard and CPU here's the thing we
suspected the team blue and team red might behave differently under extreme
conditions and we're really glad we tested both because they absolutely did
on both platforms though we also locked our CPU clock speeds core voltages and
fan speeds leaving just our CPU temperatures as our stress indicator
time to show the graphs give them a graph editor
Intel first two tests didn't work at all
rise and master we saw that one coming and Intel extreme tuning utility
we didn't see that one coming it ended up erroring out the same way in Windows
11 that we saw in our recent Dragon Canyon Nook video among the tests that
did work prime95 small fft stood
absolutely alone beating out the next highest score by 10 freaking degrees
there's just no other way to put this we
did not believe our results so thinking that maybe Intel's turbo
boost power management was bunging up the other tests or something we re-ran
the entire Suite with our voltages and our clock speeds back to stock and to
say I'm shocked would be putting it mildly it was like witnessing a brutal
beat down in slow motion again
we have some theories here but first let's get to the rest of the results our
10 middle performers had just a six degree overall spread then we had our
underperformers Intel burn test CPU-z
and occt's CPU large data set extreme
benchmark at this point you can probably see why we declared Prime 95 best in heat but
looking at Thermals alone would be a huge mistake check out the heat profile
and power consumption profile of prime95 small fft huge spikes then they just
hold indefinitely it achieves this by
repeatedly performing demanding mathematical calculations but on a data
set that's so small it fits right in the CPUs on die Cache no bottlenecks maximum
burn but obviously no real world application behaves like that even
notoriously demanding professional workloads like CPU rendering and blender
or video encoding will generate very
different profiles so if I was validating a thermal design for a
demanding client and I wanted to see an absolute worst case scenario Prime 95
needs to be part of my toolkit but if I
care more about stability in real world applications I need to look elsewhere
enter linpak the mo most used stability stress testing tool of all time it was
originally created for use on super computers in the 1970s and in a nutshell
it's a software library that performs linear algebra this equation
specifically on repeat and it still behaves the same way today except it's
been rehashed multiple times to keep up with modern computers which is pretty
important considering that it was written in Fortran a code language that
is so old it was originally input via punch carts fun fact by the way because
linpak is a library not an application it's easy for developers to integrate it
into their own test Suites and six of the tests we used are actually Lin pack
based but even then not all tests are
equal because there are multiple Lin pack versions and any of those can be
combined with other methods to create a complete hodgepodge of stress for your
poor CPU this is what a limpac load looks like on
our thermal graphs a spiky wave gets produced as each equation is solved then
there's a brief pause between calculations and now that we know this
it's really easy to spot this shape in many of the tests that we ran now if we
switch from temperature to power consumption we see well the same thing
these swings in power are really tough on not just your CPU but also your
motherboard vrms and your power supply which is a perfect combination for
evaluating stability which we're definitely going to check out on AMD's
New 3D zcash CPUs so get subscribed so
you don't miss it also buy a shirt or a water bottle haha lttstore.com on that
note let's take a look at our AMD results here we didn't see anything that
seemed anomalous so we left our voltages and clock speeds locked per our original
test methodology to start with AMD ran
much cooler overall with Delta T's so that's the temperature difference
between ambient and our CPU peaking at
just 39 degrees compared to Intel's 56. man 12th gen performs but lordy is it
ever hot now prime95 still came on top for
thermal stress but only barely just half
a degree behind was Ida 64. then the
middle of our chart doesn't have the same flat middle Zone as Intel instead
there's a fairly consistent decline with a spread of about 10 degrees note by the
way that rise and master did run but it's right near the bottom of these
thermal stress loads we don't know for sure why that would be but my tinfoil
hat says that maybe AMD doesn't want you to cook your CPU I don't know though
even ignoring ryzen Master we can draw some interesting conclusions here in if
you want to hit it hard it's prime95 for maximum heat output with Ida 64 FPU as a
close runner up as for stability well we already learned
that this is not what we're looking for we want a rapidly oscillating power load
so let's have a look at one of our Lin pack loads occt linpak 2021 and oof look
at that power draw porcupine right there 35 Watts bikes roughly 6 times per
minute how about Linux again very nice
very stable clock speeds which we expect since we locked it but we still saw some
intermittent clock drops and huge swings
in power draw from 82 Watts all the way to 170 Watts this is probably the best
example we could have hoped for to show you why you need to test with multiple
pieces of software every one of these is a valid part of your stress test toolkit
yet each is different sitting down and inspecting these results though lead to
some pretty tidy conclusions for you to take with you if you want to get in and
out quickly Prime 95 is going to give you thermal results on air in about 15
minutes and on an a a water cooler in about 30 to 40 minutes as for stability
a Lin pack load like Linux occt linpak
or linpak Xtreme are the best bang for your time bucks
unfortunately for those ones I can't give you a firm guideline for how long
you need to run them though because it comes down to personal preference for a
gaming test bench I might be comfortable with 10 minutes but for a video editing
workstation that I want years of service from 24 to 48 hours isn't out of the
question also none of these synthetic
loads excuse ignoring real world ones if
you've got the time and if you're serious about it a blender render or
continuous cinebench run followed by a few rounds of Puget bench would
absolutely be a good idea now it may not be common knowledge but the tools that
we use to log and review our data today are both free for personal use HW info
and generic log viewer and you can check them out at the links in the video
description HW info allows you to log all your sensor data while generic log
viewer gives you a perfect tool for quickly and easily charting that data
and comparing against other runs what I hope is common knowledge though is our
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interested in this sort of thing why not check out whole room water cooling that
was a stress test on us haha that's very funny I like your joke that you wrote
foreign