How to Stress-Test Graphics Cards (Like We Do)

[FormatC]

Readers often ask us which applications are best for stability and temperature testing, and why we use some, but not others. In response, we generated some results to help quantify our choices for measuring power, heat, and the usefulness of overclocks.

How to Stress-Test Graphics Cards (Like We Do) : Read more

 

[phobicsq]

Doesn't hwmonitor cost money?

 

[FormatC]

HWiNFO is free

 

[Th_Redman]

Great article of information Igor(and Tom's, of course). I use a number of these stress tests and your article listed some I've never heard of or read about, so thank you.

 

[Jay E]

But did you eat the egg?

 

[Unolocogringo]

Very nice article to point newbie overclockers towards. You have to have some basic understanding if you want to overclock successfully.
I have overclocked everything possible since my first overclock.A pentium 75mhz I overclocked to 90mhz. This was mid to late 1996. I learned how to do it from This site. Toms Hardware (sysdoc.pair.com back then).
Since I overclock every thing to stable 100% load 24/7/365 for Folding@Home and occasional gaming, It must be 100% stable for correct folding results. And of course gaming with my son and grandson.
I use most of the tests and tools you do, except for the fancy thermal images, to achieve this. Nice to know my testing methods are the Same as yours, but mine last 36 to 48 hours on final overclock settings before being put into service.


Overclocking is a serious affliction , even my non overclockable SuperMicro 2p server board is overclocked from 2.5 to 3.0 on all 8 cores and folding away for years.
Enjoyed your article and testing methodology explained. Thanks

 

[ddferrari]

For my uses (gaming, surfing) I see no reason to push a component to its power or thermal limit via synthetic tests. All that does is shorten its life span. I don't care if my OC fails during a multiple hour, unrealistic load. If it runs fine during real-world usage then I'm satisfied.

All my components are overclocked, and I test them for stability the old fashioned way: I USE them. They key is to overclock only one component at a time and see if problems arise while gaming. I keep bumping up the OC until an issue pops up- then I know where the maximum lies.

There seems to be a lot of monkey-see-monkey-do going on around the internet these days.

 

[stonedwookie]

We dont care about the stats what we want to know is did the eggs taste good?
what would you rate the eggs ?

 

[FormatC]

The egg got only three-stars rating (3/5).

The reason why:
It was simply too long for my taste and it is a real pain to look over such a long time at this egg if you are hungry

 

[Co BIY]

What is the best thermal paste to use for a mining rig omelet pan?

 

[FormatC]

Olive Oil. The best taste

 

[captaincharisma]

for best results you must play at least 30 mins of final fantasy XV with all settings on ultra

 

[themartian]

DiRT Rally is also very good at detecting OC issues of GPU's and CPU's. It has built benchmark with loop functionality. Althrough it doesn't place much load for current hw for the stability testing it works very well.