CPU stress testing with "stress"

Question

I'm planning to stress test my OCed AMD Athlon X4 880K from a live session. I've heard about the "stress" tool. How is it used for CPU stress testing? I plan to monitor temps with lm_sensors. Do you know of the correct syntax to make "sensors" run in sensible intervals?

Solution 1

As the author of stress-ng, I'd personally recommend it as it has a wide range of stress tests that can be used to exercise the CPU in many different ways.

There are many ways to exercise the CPU, with stress-ng one can tell it to run all the stressors that can stress a CPU using:

stress-ng --class cpu --sequential 0 -t 60 -v

..and to check the temperatures from the thermal zone information, one can use:

stress-ng --class cpu --sequential 4 -t 60 -v --tz

The above will run the cpu class of stressors one by one (sequentially) for 60 seconds with verbose mode enabled and with thermal zone stats on 4 CPUs

Or one can run specific stressors, such as:

stress-ng --matrix 0 -t 2m

..this will run the matrix stressor for 2 minutes on all the CPUs (0 = all CPUs).

The manual with stress-ng details all the options. There are over 170 stressors to play with. To see all the stressors, use:

stress-ng --help | less

Solution 2

If you want to try using stress in TUI format, you try using s-tui. It is a terminal UI app we have created exactly for the purpose of stressing and monitoring temps.

It is available on github and on PyPi. https://amanusk.github.io/s-tui/

Installation with pip is: sudo pip install s-tui

You still need to install stress or stress-ng, but you can change the parameters from inside s-tui. The default is to run on all cores for infinite time.

Comments

[H3R3T1K]

So I would use "stress -c 4" to test my 4 cores? Is there an option to have it run a certain time i.e. 6 hours?

[H3R3T1K]

I rephrased my question. Could you provide an answer? I plan to run it for 4-6 hours as I would Prime95 on a Windows machine. Do I have to use 14400 for 4 hours?.

[d1bro]

the proper command for 4 hours would be: stress -c 4 -t 4h - but hey it was just a little stress --help away;

[Tooniis]

watch sensors will refresh the temperatures every 2 seconds. If you want a different interval then use -n <interval> (something like watch -n 0.5 sensors for intervals of half a second)

[Sandu Ursu]

I use stress-ng to test my undervolting offset. It seems to be exploiting my CPU at higher clock speeds compared to Linpack Xtreme which claims to be the most aggressive stress testing software available 'today'.