[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Keep it stable, stupid! How to stress-test your PC hardware here

[swing84]

Do you want people to melt down their overclocked Ivy Bridge CPUs? Prime 95 and OCCT will burn them up.

Use AIDA64 for Ivy Bridge CPUs. It is much more tuned for the new generation of CPUs and has specific testing for them.

[BearPup]

I ran IntelBurnTest and OCCT on my refurbished Dell Latitude D630 (4 years old, designed for XP). It handled both fine, well within Intel's published specs for its duo core CPU.

[Lsatenstein]

If you put your pc in the oven at 120F, and you run the stress test for an hour, you will quickly know if you have
a) a mother board problem
A memory problem
c) A video card problem
d) A power supply problem

Stress testing hard disks is important and difficult. Many disks come with 64megs or cache. Monitoring smolt output would be advised.

Do realize that more failures occur with mother boards and power supplies than other electronics.

Do also clean the lint from your system every few months. My systems have air intake filters. The lint blocks cooling and is a cause of premature heating of components.

In my view, stress testing is only good for incipient failure elimination.