If you want to put a live stress test into action you have to deal with requirements that exceed the usual benchmarking. There are the stress test systems as well as additional hardware; whether this is programmable cameras or measuring equipment. And finally you need more computers to take care of the log data, convert it into suitable formats, prepare it for publication and upload it to web servers.

The next step is to find suitable benchmark programs and stress test tools and utilities. This can be tricky, because these do not always work with the latest hardware or have other issues. Finally, there will always be a chance that software or hardware does not cause problems until it runs over a long period of time. Hence we used Borland Delphi to write some of these tools ourselves.

This is a source code screenshot of our tool that automates the clock speed increases in given time increments.

This is what the automation tool looks like.

We also required a large screen resolution in order to accommodate all the live test data.

The desktop resolution is 2560x1024.

We moved on to OCZ and its DDR2-800 memory a couple of hours ago.