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Stress testing a graphics card is one of the best ways to check its stability under extreme load.
Stress testing the graphics card that’s installed on your computer is one of the best ways to check its stability under load. While running a regular GPU benchmark is enough to gauge its performance under load, a stress test will put greater load on it. There are plenty of ways to generate load to test your GPU’s stability, but running a stress test is often recommended as a simple and safe way to perform the ultimate test for your GPU.
A stress test, in case you are wondering, is a great way to find potential failures that may occur in your graphics card due to things like overclocking. It’s also a great way to troubleshoot existing problems and narrow their root cause. It’s a completely safe procedure as most modern GPUs are designed to throttle down or even shut down when the power limits breach critical levels. Not to mention, you can also set custom parameters within the stress testing benchmark or tool itself. You can set up things like a temperature alarm, a custom duration for the test, and more if you feel the need to play it a bit safely.
How to stress test your GPU
Pick a benchmarking tool and get started
There’s no shortage of benchmarking and stress utilities out there in 2023 to put a graphics card through its paces. For our stress test, we’ll be using FurMark, which is completely free to download and use on your computer. FurMark is known to push the limits of graphics card, and it even displays a caution dialog warning noting that it’s very GPU intensive and may lead to system crashes and other instabilities. But you can set custom preset settings and things like high temperature warnings to ensure you’re not pushing your GPU beyond critical limits.
- Head to Geeks3D website and click the Download button to open a new tab.
- Select the latest version of FurMark (v1.37.2.0 at the time of writing this tutorial).
- Click the download button to get the utility for free from the Geeks3D server.
- Install and run the FurMark utility to see a small window with details about the detected GPUs and the options to set preset settings.
- Select Settings to open a new window with some advanced options and tabs to enter custom values for things like GPU temperature alarm and benchmark duration.
- Click on the GPU stress button to see a dialog box with some warnings about potential system shutdowns and instability issues.
- Click on the GO! button to begin stress with FurMark.
Your GPU temperature will now start to rise as it is stressed, so the fans will get louder, and you’ll notice a spike in GPU usage and temperature. You can exit the benchmark any time by closing the benchmark window or by pressing the Escape key on your keyboard with the benchmark window selected.
Closing thoughts
FurMark is one of the most popular utilities out there to stress test your graphics card, and it’s among the easiest ones to use. It is known to heat up your graphics card quite a bit under load, but you should be fine as long as you are using one of the modern GPUs that has fail-safe mechanisms in place. Alternatively, you can also tweak the settings to ensure you have things like temperature alarms enabled, so you can always stop the benchmark after having enough logged data. It is recommended that you run a stress test only to test its stability. Those who are looking to measure the performance and simply benchmark their hardware should consider checking utilities like Cinebench 2024 instead.
** (Disclaimer: This video content is intended for educational and informational purposes only) **
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