Standalone programs that burn CPU?

December 20, 2007 2:52 PM

For a good reason, I need some program, any program that I can leave unattended and will eat up CPU on a windows xp box. Recommendations?

I just need to do some testing. This program should run by itself for hours at least. I dont care what it does as long as it burns cpu - at least 50% would be great - if I can tune this, even better. Also, the machine may not have internet access - so no seti@home I suppose.

posted by vacapinta to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Prime95?

There are lots of "burn-in" utilities out there.
posted by meowzilla at 2:55 PM on December 20, 2007

Progress Quest?
posted by ODiV at 3:04 PM on December 20, 2007

folding@home.
posted by shmegegge at 3:05 PM on December 20, 2007 [1 favorite]

CPU Burn-In

Works great, used it for years, just remember to run a copy for each core your cpu has.
posted by Cosine at 3:14 PM on December 20, 2007

Distributed.net clients can work offline, either generating keys to work off, or better you can fetch a bunch of work on a system with network access and copy the buff-in.* files to the non-networked system.

Should keep however many cores you have pegged, and probably easier to set up than most other distributed projects (e.g. Folding@Home's clients only barely support SMP and have no work prefetching I can see). When you're done you can copy the buff-out.* files off, flush them and probably make it to the top-100 for a day.
posted by Freaky at 3:22 PM on December 20, 2007

I designed this website to churn CPUs. Flick the [+] on the top right and add a few tag clouds to the page. The more clouds, the slower, and the more CPU usage. I think that Safari has better multicore usage than Firefox or IE though, so you might wanna grab a copy of that.
posted by holloway at 3:26 PM on December 20, 2007

You can probably do this with a batch file:

:1
Goto 1
posted by Wismi at 3:31 PM on December 20, 2007