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Benchmarking and Burn-in Tools - Last Modified 2012-07-13 19:20 UTC - Created 2009-05-08 14:39 UTC

For Windows, Linux, etc a good disk benchmark problem is http://www.iozone.org/.

iozone -l 2 -u 2 -r 4k -s 100m -F /mnt/YOURDISK/f1 /mnt/YOURDISK/f2

If you don't have IOZone and want a quick and dirty sustained throughput report try the following (read only):

dd if=/dev/sdX iflag=direct of=/dev/null bs=64k

Open another terminal
iostat -m 2

CPU

For CPU burn-in I like to use the client from the distributed.net project. It simply tests the strength of encryption algorithms. Since it does so many floating point operations the CPU gets a very good test and an opportunity to reach its maximum temperature.

http://www.distributed.net/

Memory

I like to use Memtest86+. You have to boot into it though.

Another good one is HCI Design's MemTest which you can run from Windows.

Graphics

I like to take some video game like Quake and run a demo in a constant loop.

Temperature Monitoring

If your motherboard and disk drivers have sensors on them you can use CPUID's HWMonitor. It's free and is a nice alternative if your motherboard doesn't have software for temperature monitoring.

Network

IPerf

Server side

iperf --server --udp --format k --len 63K --window 64K

This will get your a good idea of your maximum real throughput. Jitter, signal loss, and overhead cause a slow down especially over TCP.

Client side

iperf --client 10.1.1.1 --udp --format k --len 63K --window 64K --bandwidth 10000M

If your router has OpenWRT you can install iperf on it for the server side.

Games as benchmark/burn-in tools

Quake 3 Arena

You can just download the official ID Software demo version or even the free community created OpenArena version.

Steps to run in a constant demo loop:

  1. Download and install the demo or the full game
  2. Create a text file called demoloop.cfg and place it in either:
    • Q3Ademo\demoq3
    • baseq3 of wherever you installed the full version or OpenArena version
  3. Add the following contents to the demoloop.cfg file
    set loop "vstr loop1"
    set loop1 "set timedemo 1 ; set cg_drawfps 1; demo demo001 ; set nextdemo vstr loop2"
    set loop2 "demo demo002 ; set nextdemo vstr loop1"
  4. Save the demoloop.cfg file and close it
  5. Fire up the game and configure your video settings
  6. At the main menu bring up the console with the ~ key
  7. Type in exec demoloop.cfg and press enter
  8. Type in vstr loop and press enter
  9. The loop will start and show the current fps on the top right of the screen