Testing Hardware

Hardware components can start malfunctioning at any time. But the malfunctioning will not always be easily noticeable, since it might not always result in a BSOD or some other obvious error. Sometimes it takes significant damage to happen for you to notice the hardware failure during regular use—and if this happens when you’re not prepared, it can be very unpleasant.

For this reason, it’s recommended that you test the hardware components every once in a while, to expose any hidden defects. You should first of all test them when they’re brand new, since a lot of the times hardware comes with a small defect out of the factory. It goes without saying that you should test them if you're overclocking or undervolting. Running these tests too often is not recommended, though, and you should get an idea of which components are more likely to develop errors over time. For example, with normal use, storage (HDD, SDD) or RAM are more likely to start malfunctioning than the CPU.

And obviously testing hardware is recommended any time you notice operating system instabilities, since those are very often caused by faulty hardware.

General guidelines

Testing specific components requires specific tools, which are listed below. At this point, let me warn you that stress testing the CPU, GPU and RAM can produce high temperatures, so make sure you have adequate cooling. You should also keep an eye on the temperatures with monitoring software, such as HWiNFO or HWMonitor.

Stress testing can also cause system instability and if this happens—and unless it’s caused by overheating, which is simply a result of poor cooling—it usually means there’s a hardware defect. So, don’t do stress testing when you’re running important tasks (having unsaved documents open etc.) and ideally don’t run any other software at all.

Testing CPU

Testing RAM

Testing graphics

Testing drives