Can stress tests damage components? BSOD problems killing me!

[Andrew Ray]

I am relatively new to PC's and built my first one in late July. However, I have been getting a BSOD hardware failure at least once a month since the first week. I have run prime95 for a maximum of 10 minutes and am worried about doing it for longer or running memtest because I do not want to damage components. In short, can stress testing shorten the lifespan of parts? Side note: these crashes are killing me and honestly am regretting even building a PC.

 

[Sevenater]

Yes, but only if you are running something at settings that will throw your CPU/GPU temps out of the house. Stay away from stuff like that. Make the settings optimal.

 

[Andrew Ray]

Yes, but only if you are running something at settings that will throw your CPU/GPU temps out of the house. Stay away from stuff like that. Make the settings optimal.

By settings, do you mean settings for the stress test programs or settings as in clock speeds?

 

[4Ryan6]

The purpose of stress testing is to force the CPU to handle a maximum load to discover the beginnings of testing to see if your overclock is stable or not.

Stress testing does not normally damage a component unless the component was on the verge of failure anyway.

Your problem is 10 minutes is no where near the time you should stress test and you are simply running your machine in an unstable overclock that's why it's crashing with the BSOD as it cannot handle the normal computer load.

That said you need to list your complete system specs including brands and model #s, along with the cooling of your CPU and operating system you're running, and lets see if we can eliminate your BSODs.

 

[Andrew Ray]

The purpose of stress testing is to force the CPU to handle a maximum load to discover the beginnings of testing to see if your overclock is stable or not.

Stress testing does not normally damage a component unless the component was on the verge of failure anyway.

Your problem is 10 minutes is no where near the time you should stress test and you are simply running your machine in an unstable overclock that's why it's crashing with the BSOD as it cannot handle the normal computer load.

That said you need to list your complete system specs including brands and model #s, along with the cooling of your CPU and operating system you're running, and lets see if we can eliminate your BSODs.

Is it possible it could be a problem with my HDD? I ask because I also have gotten 2-3 freezes while using my PC, as well has frequent freezes when waking my PC out of sleep. As a result, I just never put it in sleep =/

But now, I just installed Seagate's diagnostic tool for their hard drives, and when I opened it, it was "scanning for hard drives" and my PC completely froze while doing so. I also noticed a weirdly large increase in CPU temperature before it froze, but anyway, could the HDD very well be the culprit?

 

[4Ryan6]

Why were you stress testing?

 

[Andrew Ray]

Why were you stress testing?

Weird, I guess you edited your original post. But in response to you saying my overclock is unstable, I want to let you know that nothing I own is overclocked and don't know why you assumed so. And I was running prime95 to try and find what has been causing the crashes, as crash dumps somewhat vaguely hinted at CPU, so I started there.

But, again, doesn't it seem logical that the hard drive might be the problem...

 

[4Ryan6]

Why were you stress testing?

Weird, I guess you edited your original post. But in response to you saying my overclock is unstable, I want to let you know that nothing I own is overclocked and don't know why you assumed so. And I was running prime95 to try and find what has been causing the crashes, as crash dumps somewhat vaguely hinted at CPU, so I started there.

But, again, doesn't it seem logical that the hard drive might be the problem...

I edited because I am dealing with 2 or 3 different posts and the others are overclocking, stress testing is used to test for stability after overclocking, if you have not overclocked at all then your problem is essentially hardware or driver related.

You test hardware by memory diagnostics (Such as Memtest), HDD diagnostics (Downloaded from your HDDs website), you need to first eliminate those hardware as being the possible problem.

Sometimes your motherboard needs to be BIOS flashed and that is hardware as well.

Sometimes you have to just start removing various add in cards (Machine powered down of course) to see if any of them are causing the problem.

Once the hardware possibilities are eliminated then you look for driver problems, which usually are resolved by acquiring the latest drivers or uninstalling and reinstalling the up to date drivers if they are the latest.

It is a process of elimination until you discover the actual problem.

 

[Andrew Ray]

So...everytime I try to run Seagate's diagnostic tool for my hard drive, my computer completely freezes. I also ran a chkdsk on a restart and it completely froze during it. Seems to be pointing to a bad hard drive.

 

[Andrew Ray]

Alright what even is going on...I cloned the drive onto my second 1TB drive using DiscWizard. When only one of the drives is hooked up (it does not matter which), running SeaTools will not cause a freeze. However, when both are hooked up, it is guaranteed to freeze. what is going on...

 

[4Ryan6]

I would never have cloned a bad HDD!

Unfortunately under those circumstances of having a bad HDD your operating system is installed on, you are facing a install from scratch on a new HDD.

Then recovering what files you can from the bad HDD using a recovery program, you actually cloned problems to the new HDD.

 

[Andrew Ray]

If it is a hardware problem and not software, why would it have cloned problems? I also really don't understand why it always freezes/froze when running SeaTools with both hooked up. It did this before I even cloned it too =/