is stress test bad for your laptop?

Hi,

I know many people do stress tests overnight for their new laptops but is that okay?
Would it hurt your laptop in anyway?

Thank you!

 

Only if it was badly designed, or if they used fairly cheap components.

 

No, it will not hurt your laptop in any way. And even if it would cause problems, your laptop has built-in safeguards to prevent anything from happening.

 

The only "hurting" it will do is wear and tear. But thats what these are meant to do. I bought my jeep to wheel, haul and drive and doing less or none of those is wasted potential just as not using your computer (within the designed parameters) in fear of hurting it.

Does that mean you should stress test and benchmark all day everyday? No that would be silly.

 

Not always, I know I tested 5 DV6000 system boards in a hotbox (103c inside, temp monitored and temp controlled). All 5 died, none of them shut off to prevent damage. 3 AMD and 2 Intel.

Also my Dell M6500 suffered a bit of an accident when my cousin was using it to play games, and blocked off the exhaust.... computer got super hot, GPU/LCD ended up dead. Diagnosed it my self. No safety sensor there.

Luckily I had complete care on that system, so they replaced GPU/LCD/all cables including top panel. no questions asked.

 

The point of stress testing your laptop is to make sure they're ok. If they fail, then simply return it since it's defective.

 

With each new system (before I fully install/customize my programs and data...) I stress test for around 36-48 hours.

I do use a Zalman notebook cooler (don't want to kill the system!) and I am very sensitive to any pauses, glitches or other anomalies that the system displays during and immediately after the stress test.

If my radar picks anything up: the system is returned for refund asap.

Of the many systems I've tested this way: I have only returned a few (less than a dozen). I did waste some time exchanging systems a few times - but my experience shows that if a symptom is exhibited by one, it will be (eventually) exhibited by all (none of the exchanged systems were ever kept - they were all part of the 'returned' ones).

When the 'as delivered' system has been tested and passed to my satisfaction: I add the parts I want to it (replace RAM, HDD, O/S, etc.) and test again for a further 12-24 hours.

At this point my data is added to the system and it is still critically monitored for the next month before I am comfortable enough to use it as a 'main/replacement' system at a client's workplace.

Overkill? Yeah.

 

A bit of stress will tell you how much a new laptop can take and what to expect in a real life scenario when you might want to encode a movie or two, edit some images, play a game, listen to some music (some of these at the same time).

Lately most of them (laptops) will use throttling to keep things going. So if it works after 24h it does not mean that much.

Good systems need to keep up performance, not just work.

It's harder and harder to find one of these (good) systems.

 

Better overkill, and exhaust all resources before calling it safe.

I do similar procedure. My poor M4600 ran for 48 hours straight on Prime95/30% gpu load. Then 100 GPU load, with only 3 workers in P95.

Any PC's we use for our work undergo:
3x Hard drive tests per drive
48 hour minimum stress test, in a row
Prime95 memory stress test, 12 hours
Finally folding@home for 8 hours+- (we sometimes don't do this).

 

I do the dip-it-in-water-for-1min test (while working), and do the impact hammer test three times.

.... none has survived so far.

But really, no need to torture overnight.