LabVIEW CPU Stress Tester

[SeanDonner]

Anybody have a CPU stress tester program writen in LabVIEW that will floor all logical CPUs to 100%?  Thought this would be an easy task but I think the compiler optimizations are so good now-a-days that the best I can do is get a sustained 65% when I use a For-loop with iteration parallelism set to the "# of logical cores".   

[GerdW · Accepted solution]

Hi Sean,

this little VI puts my i7-4700 to 96-99% at 130% turbo boost:

(Parallelism to 8 cores…)

You know there are special tools to keep the CPU as busy as it can? "Burn-in tests" will use most/all parts of a modern CPU (like SSEx,MMX,FPU,…).

That little VI above will probably only use some FPU commands…

[altenbach]

Why not place several tight while loops (e.g. 😎 on the diagram instead of using a single parallel loop.

Also note that you only have 4 actual cores and it might not be possible to keep all 8 virtual cores busy due to contention.

(I was able to keep 32 virtual cores (16 real cores) busy 100%, see the bottom graph here)

[SeanDonner]

Thanks, I creating a fixed random array of similar lengh then doing a linear search on it with a randomly generated number on each iteration thinking that would do it; this is much simpler and does get me to 98% on average.

[Sam_Sharp]

Prime95 is the most commonly used program for stress testing CPUs (e.g. by overclockers) if you're not particularly looking for a LabVIEW solution.

[SeanDonner]

I'm familiar with Prime95 and the main reason I wanted a LabVIEW solution is because I don't have to jump through any of our corporate bureaucracy to get software approved for installation if I write it myself.