Burn-in Testing

[GT98]

I have an old computer that I just upgraded for a friend (ECS K7S5A with a Athlon XP 2000+ 512MB DDR, Radeon 8500 128mb video card) and I want to test the shit out of it so I dont run into any werid problems down the road with it. It ran great with the GF using it at her place, with only problem popping up was win98 not booting up all the way occinally. So I'm looking for a couple good programs to try out on it before I give it to him. I want to him to run into the problems he had with his POS he has now ...plus I give free tech support to my friends...most of the time

[Wombat]

Prime95 is always a favorite of mine for giving the CPU a good run. It will keep the FPU unit going, and that should drive the CPU's power consumption high.

Try to get the bus very busy. Transfer some files from the HD to the network, and play sound files or other stuff to slam the bus.

[mutz]

http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/sandra

[VJ]

Continious testing of the memory (we do this on all new computers for a period of at least 24 hours):

http://www.memtest86.com/

Jörg

[DGhost]

i liked cpuburn for a good processor/motherboard test...

have not spent much time looking at stress tests as of recent... i've found the best test of stability is real world applications...

[RichL]

I use SiSoft Sandra for a basic workout, usually preceeded by a full Scandisk & Defrag.
A favorite of mine is to run the Demo from 3DMark2000/2001Se in a continous loop for a few hours. Most of the time it shows up any issues, although I ran into a problem with Dungeon Siege not liking an overclocked FSB that crashed even when 3DMark was stable (note to self - try it now I have 150fsb rather than 109 )

I've been using the text clients for Seti@Home and Distributed Folding@Home to test my machines recently. They always run at 99% CPU even if they dont stress the rest of the machine much, so at least its good to see if your heatsink and cooling are up to the job.
So far DF has highlighted an issue on my new box thats probably my geriatric Mystique RRS & Matrox's Win2k drivers.

If you do go for DF/Seti, dont forget to visit the Distributed@Murc forum and sign up for the MURC teams

[Ribbit]

Install Linux on it, and try to compile at least gcc, glibc, and a kernel. (If you have a fast Internet connection, bringing Gentoo up from the earliest stage will do this a couple of times.) Seemingly random problems (like the C compiler crashing) probably mean bad memory. Good as memtest86 is, I've found this to be a much better method for finding (the presence of) problems in practice. (Shame I wasn't actually doing it for testing purposes )

[thop]

superpi. tests both mem and cpu, very reliable.