www.rodneybeede.com "I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code" - unknown
  Navigation

Benchmarking and Burn-in Tools - Last Modified 2009-05-08 14:39 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:

dd if=/dev/sdX 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

If you own the game Half-life 2 you can download a stress test version of the game for testing your system. It just runs in a constant loop and uses up quite a big of your CPU and graphics for testing.

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.