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"Ultra-X WinStress - First Look"
SUMMARY: Comprehensive test suite for Windows systems.
The good guys at Ultra-X Inc. were nice enough to send a sample of Ultra-X WinStress. This is a CD based test suite for Windows OSs (Win9x/ME/NT/2000/XP). I have used Ultra-X's P.H.D. PCI2 and RAM Stress Test Professional 2 (RST Pro2)
diagnostic test cards with great success in testing motherboards and RAM. These are PCI cards that stress test and identify hardware problems and should be an essential tool for serious product testing; for PC techs, these cards can save time in solving hardware problems.
WinStress is a less costly test suite ($99) for technicians and individual users which performs the following three major functions:
Stress Loading is of particular interest, as it's designed to push any system under test to its failure point. This is particularly valuable to system builders and others who are interested in burning in and optimizing performance. As a test suite to find problems, it's invaluable. Included with WinStress are loop-back plugs for serial and a parallel port testing.
WinStress is a great tool to evaluate system stability under overclocked conditions, something of interest to our readers. Stress tests can run in looping mode for as long as you wish or until the system crashes.
Stress Loading simultaneously tests the following:
You can customize test so that, for example, the only thing you stress is the CPU. I'm going to do some more testing on this shortly - my test platform is currently occupied, so I could not use it.
When finished, it can generate a complete report of the system with data on Display, Devices, Drivers, Network Configurations, APM, Media, Workstation, Operating System, CPU, Memory, Database Engines, and Printers. Phew! If there's a problem, this test suite is going to find it. WinStress is a great way to burn in a new system.
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