Whats a good stress test application for a haswell CPU?

[Thegame741]

I just bought a 4770k processor and i want to try to stress test it to check the heat and if there are any flaws. I heard prime 95 is not recommended for haswell CPUs so what else should i use?

 

[Karsten75]

I think you misunderstood. You can use any benchmark. Prime95, Aida, Crystalmark. SiSoft Sandra, etc. but they might get thermally throttled. It depends on the cooling. If you run stock cooling, then most likey you will not be able to evaluate the peak performance of your processor. Intel did not provide a cooling solution that is adequate to cool the processor during a stress test.

 

[clueless77]

OCCT and POVRay, use both to test for stability (courtesy of Anandtech bench methods). Prime puts a lot of stress on a CPU, and given the new design with the Haswell chips with the voltage regulator being immediately adjacent to the die, runs them a lot hotter during stability tests even with adequate cooling with heavier overclocks and higher voltages. Like I was getting near 100 C temps during just one of the passes in Prime with a 4.7 ghz core overclock with 1.32 volts, around 80 C max in OCCT, and with normal usage even in more demanding, multithreaded applications I never exceed 55 c on the hottest core with my h80i set to normal mode. So if I were to scale back on my voltage and clocks because of the heat being generated in Prime, I wouldn't be able to push this chip to its limit and maximize the money I sunk into it pertaining to performance while still clocking within a margin of safety relative to longevity.

But yeah, like Karsten said, if you're on the stock heatsink I wouldn't do anything other than a very mild overclock that doesn't require over a .025 increase in core voltage. Even at stock, Prime will run that cpu into excessively high temps, but you shouldn't need to stress your cpu to see what type of temps will be generated under 100% load if you're already stable with manageable temps in normal usage.