HowTo Check if RAM and CPU are OK

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Revision as of 11:13, 21 October 2013 by AntonChupin (Talk | contribs)

1 Introduction

For today's PCs, the usual memtest86+ that is provided with Linux Distribution isn't enough to catch some of the memory errors that occurs on the latest hardware (since 2008-2009).

This is one of the various reasons that Google developed the application stressapptest: stressapptest @ Google Code - For more information, check their own introduction: Introduction


2 Installation

Currently, this is distributed by default on all major up-to-date Linux Distributions, so it should be as easy as running:

  • Ubuntu/Debian:
    sudo apt-get install stressapptest
  • Fedora:
    sudo yum install stressapptest
  • openSUSE:
    sudo zypper install stressapptest

As for building from source code, it should be the standard build procedure used on Linux:

./configure
make
make install

This is also explained here: Installation Guide


3 Usage

Example of commands for properly testing RAM:

  • This test does a thorough test of of a high stress communication between CPU and RAM, able to detect issues that are not detected with memtest86+:
    stressapptest -W --cc_test
  • To do the previous test with only 5GB of RAM:
    stressapptest -W --cc_test -M 5000