gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials » overclocking

OverClock Checking Tool

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 11:31:58 +0000

I had my first overclocking experience with my brand new Pentium 75 back then in the days when this was considered a fast cpu. A friend of mine actually introduced me to it to and we managed to make the computer a little bit faster that way. After that I never looked back and never tried to overclock again, rumors of reduced component life time and instablity kept me away. I also had no need to overclock the PC just to get a few percent in speed, figured it was not worth it.

Overclocking has changed over time though and it seems that the change is drastic when you look at video cards for instance. You can buy overclocked video cards right from the manufacturer and even the standard tools from Nvidia and Ati make it possible to overclock the GPU.

It’s only natural that the overclocking scene created tools to check if the changes were causing any instabilities on their system and that’s where OverClock Checking Tool [OCCT, via Neowin] comes into play. The startup window is displaying all kinds of information about your computer that are relevant to overclockers, e.g. voltages or cpu and bus clock settings.

The main purpose of OCCT is to check the two core components CPU and RAM with the option to check one or both of the components. The default test lasts for an hour but there is the possibility to raise that to two hours or let it run until you hit the OFF button.

Results are saved as graphs in graphics which is great because you will have access to them even if you close the tool.

DIY: Easy CPU probe

Tobey — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 07:37:31 +0000

We always try to lower our CPU usage as much as possible for a normal use. Still, there are situations like testing purposes when we may want our CPU to be 100% busy to test its behavior. This is usually tightly related to overclocking and probing the CPU cooling system capability along with it. Of course you can always use benchmarking applications to give your system some harsh time but it’s not necessary when you know how to increase CPU load all the way up to 100% easily in a few seconds. Note that this has only been tested on single-core computers, it prolly won’t work with multi-core CPUs.

Once when messing with command-line features a bit, I found out that a simple 1-line code can bring my CPU to 100% load in a second for as long as I want. If I really wanted to test the reliability of my CPU fan or water cooling system, I would run this tiny code for pretty long time like a few hours to make my CPU sweat a bit. Now to that simple code – bring up the Run window by pressing Win+R and start command line by putting cmd in it. Here comes that simple loop:

for /L %i in (1,1,#) do help
(replace the # with a number determining how many loops will be executed and also how much time it’ll take to finish the task, depending on your CPU’s performance)

Pretty simple, huh? It does nothing else than to repeat displaying command-line’s built-in help which should raise (according to my multiple tests) every single-core CPU load to 100% and maintain it at that level for the time the script is executed. That’s all folks !